


You Know Me Better Than I Do

by 34m3s4



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Child Neglect, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Identity Issues, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:35:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 61,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22162663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/34m3s4/pseuds/34m3s4
Summary: An unstable sense of self has long been a weakness Eames turned into an asset, how easy is it to become anyone when you’re never quite stable yourself. But when opportunity arises, he finds he’s ready to discover himself, and Arthur along the way.
Relationships: Arthur/Eames (Inception)
Comments: 53
Kudos: 102





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Further content warning info:  
> The child abuse/neglect is all referenced and none occurs in this fic (ie no flashbacks). It isn’t gone over in extreme detail, but it is discussed beyond just a brief vague mention.
> 
> I also tagged this “Friends with Benefits” and “Friends to Lovers”, though most accurate would be “Coworkers with Benefits to Lovers” but that’s not an option so hopefully those tags imply the gist.
> 
> I may have only two fics up on this account now, but can you sense a theme? Maybe I’ll polish off one of my lighter ones one of these days… 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you all enjoy!
> 
> PS Shoutout to a very special someone in my life who suggested I title this fic “The Importance of Being Eamesnest” I love you dearly darling and that suggestion had me nearly choking on my gin.

Anyone with any passing familiarity with dreamshare knows you can’t control your projections. Anyone with any skill knows you can hide them, though. And the hiding is important. If you work in dreamshare you need to know how to hide your secrets and this includes projections, the ones that give away a little too much information.

Eames has been in the business long enough and he’s skilled enough so he keeps his secrets locked away where they can’t be touched. A number of projections among them. He knows the same can be said for most everyone he works with, Dom Cobb not included.

Or, previously included, but certainly not by the end.

Eames doesn’t worry about the hiding anymore, he’s skilled and he’s been doing this long enough that it doesn’t require thought. He’s got a handle on his secrets and he’s not like Cobb, doesn’t have anything lurking around trying to escape. Everything that haunts him is under lock and key.

While Cobb’s lack of control and rogue projection had undoubtedly fucked them over, the little team he’d assembled for the Fischer job had managed to do what so many deemed impossible. Inception.

Sometimes Eames marveled at just how unimaginative dreamers could be. Their entire work was imagination, was pushing at the bounds of possibility, of reality, and people wanted to make calls as to what was impossible?

Regardless, they’d done it. The impossible. It left them rich and high on their own talent. It got Cobb out of the game and back with his kids. It got them a little ragtag group of trusted coworkers. Not that Eames would have ever baulked at working with them before, he knew they were talented, but post-inception they had a certain trust in each other that hadn’t been there before. Even for Ariadne, for all that she was a mere babe in the dreamshare world.

They didn’t become a _team_ exactly, dreamshare was too broad and loose and ready-made teams weren’t really typical.

Mal and Dom Cobb, excluded. And wasn’t that always the way with the Cobbs?

But still, they found themselves working together with more frequency. Eames was glad for it, he liked Arthur and Ariadne and Yusuf. Liked them as people (admittedly, for vastly differing reasons) and liked them as coworkers, inception-as-trust-exercise-and-bonding only boosting that.

So when Arthur called him up and said he had a job and the other two were already in, Eames was eager to say yes. He’d have been pleased with any job Arthur offered, but it would be particularly nice to see everyone.

The job itself is simple, though unique. The client and the mark are one and the same. He’s a businessman who has heard of the threat of dreamshare and so he went and got himself militarized. Now he wants a team to try to extract from him.

He’s rich enough and paranoid enough to hire them. Eames knows he has an ego, but his work speaks for itself. The man has hired the crème de la crème of dreamshare for this test. Overkill perhaps, but Eames isn’t one to argue with a paycheck. Besides, Arthur said that he wants to be tested by the best. He wants to know just how effective his militarization was. He wants them to stalk him and sedate him and attempt the extraction, just like if he was only the mark and their client was his rival.

Simple, straightforward. No surprises and beyond just the familiarity of a typical sort of corporate espionage job, there’s the added bonus that no matter what way the job goes the mark shouldn’t come after them.

It’s low risk, which means it’s perfect for a little experimentation. Yusuf loves to get his hands on new compounds and tinker around with formulas until he hits upon a new discovery. They’re all willing participants in these studies, after all, it wasn’t risk aversion that got them in this line of work.

Most of the experiments are fairly mundane. Different sedatives, attempts at stabilizing or destabilizing dreams, and so on.

But of course, with an experimental compound, the unexpected can occur. You can’t predict how something new might play out.

At first things seem normal, they’re all trying to catalogue what the new formula has changed, if anything, but it seems so far like whatever it is, it’s subtle. It almost seems like a failed experiment, possibly wholly unchanged from a standard somnacin blend until Eames catches sight of a woman who should not be there.

She should be far, far away with all the rest of his secrets.

Yet there she is, not looking a day over twenty-five, in her little kitten heels and her dress straight out of the forties. He remembers her taking him along on shopping trips to vintage shops. He remembers being dazzled by her elegance and the beauty of those stuffed full rooms of silks and furs and the smell of mothballs. The lingering of long forgotten perfume and the little hints of past lives left in every missing button, every tiny torn stitch.

Clothes are transformative, but there’s something special about clothes that had once been someone else’s. Or maybe many someones. By donning them you weave yourself into a story that started long before your own and would continue after you ceased to be.

She walks directly to him, not paying any of the others any mind. Her expression is neutral enough, but he has a sense of foreboding. It may just be because she shouldn’t be here, she should be kept locked away with everything else he keeps to himself.

“It’s been a long time,” she sounds the same as ever, lyrical lilt to her Irish accent. Softened by her years in England surrounded by the sounds of Upper Received Pronunciation, but still there.

He doesn’t say anything in response and she narrows her eyes. 

“So this is what you do now?”

“What’s going on?” Ariadne asks, a little hesitantly. Brave girl, she is. She faces danger with headstrong determination and Eames admires her for it.

“She’s a projection,” Eames says.

“But why’s she so—“

“Real?” The woman interrupts, “Because I’m important. Aren’t I?” She addresses this last question to Eames, a challenge in her tone.

He declines to take the bait.

“You’ve changed,” she says, looking him over with careful study. “Wearing clothes that aren’t yours.” And oh the double meaning there, if he weren’t so busy trying to remain tactical about this, he’d take a moment to thrill at the double-edged acknowledgement of his vintage clothing and the fact that he dresses for the character he plays. It just so happens that every character he crafts for himself to be likes to wear stories of bygone eras. That is one consistency of himself, even if the particular tastes and eras change.

He’d say that just to prove he has something to his person, but he knows better than to engage. There’s no reason to overplay his hand.

“Even your voice, you change it, don’t you?” Rhetorical, she knows he does. She remembers him parroting her accent back at her, practicing until it sounded natural. He’s always been a quick study.

“All these people…” She sounds melancholy. “All these people and no one knows who you were, who you are. You don’t even know anymore do you?”

She’s trying to cut deep, but he won’t let anyone know that. He assumes, as a projection, she knows. She is, after all, part of his subconscious. But that doesn’t mean he has to react.

“You may not know who you are, but do you remember who you were?”

He does. He remembers all the many people he’s been.

“Forgery…” she says this softly, trailing off. Like she’s getting new bits of information slowly, cataloguing them and figuring things out like a puzzle. “People say you’re the best forger in the business.”

That’s true, but he isn’t sure why it’s relevant. His forgery certainly isn’t something she ever knew about. She’s never heard of dreamshare.

“It’s funny, isn’t it? When people say that,” she says this like a revelation, new clarity come to her, “Because they don’t even know. They don’t know that you never stop forging, that you haven’t stopped for years now.”

Also true, but he likes this less and less. Her uncharacteristic sinister edge, her teasing, cutting words, how she’s circling closer and closer to revealing him.

“You’ve perfected Mr. Eames.” She steps closer to him, so close it seems unnatural to not be touching. “You can hold him even under torture, you know this from experience. You don’t slip, not once. He’s your magnum opus.”

“Are you proud?” He asks, unthinking. He knows better than to engage.

“I was always proud of you,” she says, laying her hand gently on his chest and giving him a small smile. There’s a short pause as she moves her hand to straighten the lapel of his jacket, then rest her palm over his heart. 

“I loved him.” She says this so fondly, so softly. Then, turn on the dime, her eyes are alight with anger and she snatches her hand back to point her finger at him accusingly. “You killed him.”

Eames holds himself in check. Reaction will only give information and he holds his cards close to the vest.

She’s furious now. “You killed that little boy. _My_ little boy. Burned every trace of his memory like you were cauterizing a wound and then you salted the earth.”

Eames almost replies this time, stopping himself at the last moment, but she sees it, she sees she’s struck a nerve. But instead of going in for the kill, screaming and yelling, she softens again. “He was yours too and look what you did to him. Did he deserve it?”

 _Yes_ , Eames wants to say, _he did_. He says nothing.

She draws herself up, some fire returning. “You made it so there couldn’t even be a funeral and then you left me to mourn him alone. Did you ever think of that? Did you even care?”

“You shouldn’t have mourned him,” Eames says, against his better judgement.

“I loved him. You’re the one who never did.”

He takes a moment to center himself, doesn’t look away from her, but when he speaks his voice is loud and clear and directed at the others. “She wasn’t cruel.”

And she wasn’t. She’d never once been cruel to him. Angry sometimes, but never in an unreasonable sort of way. Just human. But cruelty wasn’t in her nature.

Pity was. He sees it in her eyes now. That pity she called love. It’s colored here with an unnatural cruelty where in reality it had always gone hand in hand with kindness. He’d never doubted her sentiment, but he knew there was pity in her affection.

It made sense though, that her affection came with that shadow. What else could he expect from her when he couldn’t even get his own mother to love him?

He looks away from her, sees the rest of the team standing and staring. Frozen watching this spectacle.

“She wasn’t cruel,” he says again. “Whatever this formula did let her out, but it changed her nature. She looks and sounds like herself, but her words are… too calculated. Against her nature.” He says this all dispassionately, like it’s any other observation. He intends everyone to take it as such.

“The boy… who was he?” Ariadne asks, fear in her eyes and in the waiver of her voice. Brave, brave girl.

He looks at her and the conversation replays in his mind, pieces slotting into place as he realizes that none of them have context. Hell, if he was one of them he’d suspect it was two parents discussing their son. Their son that the father killed.

Eames is many things, many of which are immoral and dangerous, but he doesn’t particularly relish the thought of everyone thinking he’d killed his own son. He doesn’t even have a son.

“Me,” he says, simply.

And then, mercifully, there’s a swell of music to warn of the imminent kick.

They do try to avoid death in these experimental dreams, the threat of limbo via heavy sedation still looms large in all their minds post-inception.

Everyone’s a little off kilter when they wake, no one more so than Eames, but he hides it well. He knows the others are looking at him, trying to see if he’s cracked. Trying to determine how worried to be.

Wondering to themselves if he’s another Cobb.

But he holds himself together and acts perfectly normal. He knows what they’re looking for in Eames and he knows how to provide it. Forges on ahead like nothing’s happened and the others seem content enough to let it be. For now anyway, Eames is sure they’ll be keeping an eye on him for the rest of the job, but he isn’t too concerned. He knows how to act and he’s certain she only showed up due to Yusuf’s new compound. If he avoids that, then everything should be fine.

He sets it all aside until he’s alone in his hotel room that night. If he were home he’d pour himself a few fingers of scotch, it’s a good drink for this. But he’s in a hotel so instead he pulls a few mini bottles from the minibar and downs them. Then carefully, carefully, he pulls out his mental trunk where those secret things that tried to come out earlier are supposed to stay.

Those things don’t belong to Mr. Eames, or anyone else he’s been lately for that matter. Sure, some of their secrets are there, but there are secrets that far predate them.

He doesn’t do this often, but seeing… her. It brought things up, things he doesn’t usually think about. His past, his family. All these things from long before Eames even existed.

She’d asked him if he remembered who he’d been and the answer is yes. No matter how much he acts as if he doesn’t, he does. He doesn’t forget. He knows who he was, who he’s been. But she was also right that he doesn’t know who he is.

Or, perhaps that’s not quite right.

He knows he’s Eames. He remembers creating Eames and he knows that’s who he is now. And yet, it isn’t. Not really. It’s just who he is for now. It’s an act, just like everything else. Second nature.

Or, first nature, if that’s a thing. It’s what he does, what he’s always done. Act until he gets the feedback that tells him he’s playing his role right. Switch roles if need be, but always act.

He’s wondered before if he started acting in the womb. He’d never heard his mother discuss her pregnancy, but given her proclivity to throw a fit over just about any inconvenience that struck her he’d long taken this to mean it had been an easy one—as pregnancies go.

Either that or remembering that she’s once held him within herself was too much for her to think on. That it was in her own self he’d been shaped into being.

But maybe it had been easy. Maybe as a fetus, intimately connected to her in a way he’d never be again he could feel that she didn’t want him and so he behaved as best he could in some doomed hope that if he was just good enough she’d come round and see him as having worth.

If that had been his plan it hadn’t worked. Not in the womb and not in life.

Though, his later rebellion hadn’t done anything either. It wasn’t as if she hated him and so none of his acting up had really phased her. Worn on her a bit at times perhaps, but in the way some minor annoyance does. Not something you pay any mind.

Acting out hadn’t gotten him the attention he craved any more than good behaviour had.

When he was younger he used to wonder if she hated herself for having made him. Or, if she never even thought of it at all.

He used to push at those thoughts like they were bruises, poking and prodding to see which hurt worse. He could never quite manage to quantify it.

It wasn’t that his mother hated him, she never really cared enough to be capable of hate. It was simply disinterest. She’d had a child because she was married and was expected to have a child. He knows his parents had gotten married for the same reason. It was just what was expected. Certainly, they’d never displayed any actual interest in each other as people. His mother had her social events and his father had his mistresses and they hired a nanny to raise the child they created out of some sense of societal duty.

He had always liked his mother more, though. For all that she didn’t like him, at least she didn’t particularly dislike him. His father did, he knows. His father always took more of an interest than she did, but his interest was all anger and dislike. He’d always preferred his mother’s glazed eye, her thousand yard stare looking through him, than his father’s quick temper focusing in on those occasions he remembered he had a son to concern himself with.

His father hated whatever it was he saw in him. Or maybe that he looked at his son and saw nothing at all. Eames remembers acting, putting on personas and personalities like they were shirts. Trying to be this way, then that. See what reactions he could get, what people would and wouldn’t believe. He doesn’t remember feeling any of it was particularly him.

Maybe that was natural, that for all his parents had obviously been intimate enough to create him, they were never invested. Maybe it was inevitable that such a cold and distant attempt to make someone would saddle them with a child who was really no one at all.

He wonders sometimes if others can see him for the blank canvas he is. Doubtful, he’s fairly certain they all just see the image laid overtop, the colors and the brushstrokes he carefully crafts, he is, after all, an excellent painter. They see all the detail he carefully drapes on and none of the emptiness below.

Which, is another way he sometimes thinks about himself. An empty cup just waiting to be filled. A vessel from which anything can grow.

He may not exactly be Eames, but he does like him. Though the man has his vices. But that’s only natural, after all he did create Eames to be convincing. With a personality and likes and dislikes, virtues and vices, talents and failings. A real boy.

But he likes Eames, vices aside. Or maybe not aside, after all Eames wouldn’t be very real without them. Being Eames is easy, he knows the man inside and out. He knows what Eames would think, would do, in any given situation. Eames is comfortable, well worn. He thinks he’ll be sorry to see Eames go, should it ever come to that.

But he will kill Eames if he must. Just like he’s killed every other person he’s been, when the time came.

The rest of the job goes smoothly. He can tell the others are watching him, waiting for a rogue projection to pop out. Cobb did a number on everyone’s paranoia about those. But he does his job, smooth and competent as usual, and his subconscious behaves itself, so everyone chalks it up to the experimental formula and declines to press further.

One good thing about their line of work is despite them all being nosy as all hell, they also know how to respect boundaries. After all, if you go rooting around a coworker’s subconscious they’ll more than likely hit you back.

Ariadne, not included. She’s nosier by far and headstrong enough to follow any lead, but Eames doesn’t mind it so much with her. Maybe because she doesn’t come from a criminal background and it’s clear she follows a personal curiosity, rather than one born of a penchant for blackmail and the like. And anyway, she seems content to leave well enough alone in this case.

Things on this matter don’t come to a head until later. First, the team disperses. There’s not the same rush and subterfuge as with a normal job, after all the client and mark are one and the same on this one and he was pleased by the job they did, but still, people do have places to be, other jobs to work.

Eames elects to stay behind with Arthur and help him clean up the warehouse, disposing of all planning materials and wiping down any evidence. Standard procedure. Not standard is the fact that they’ll be able to retire to a hotel together tonight, rather than worrying about weaving a convoluted escape path, hopping borders until they’re reasonably safe.

It means they can fuck and not worry about coworkers or marks or clients or running.

The two of them have had an on-and-off casual sex arrangement for a while now, though lately it seems to have shifted firmly into ‘on’. They try to avoid being too obviously together during a job, and they aren’t _together_ together anyway, but every time they’ve seen each other lately they’ve wound up in bed nearly every night.

Eames is looking forward to being able to take the whole night, with no need to set an alarm the next morning. No job, no meetings or research or surveillance to rush off to. Just them and a hotel room for as long as they wish.

Arthur says he has a few last things to do as wrap up and sends Eames off with a promise to meet him at the hotel later. Eames takes this time to move out of his room and into Arthur’s. He lays about for a while, checks his messages. Eventually realizes that Arthur’s probably not going to show until after dinner so he eats by himself.

Eventually, he makes his way to the hotel bar, waiting for Arthur to finish whatever it is that still needs doing. He’s caught the eye of a handsome young man who he might even consider an evening with, were he not already otherwise engaged. As it is, he’s enjoying the company and the flattery. He’s made it clear he’s not going anywhere with him, but he does enjoy a good flirtation.

It takes longer than Eames was anticipating for Arthur to finally show, but when he does Eames finds himself unable to look anywhere else. Arthur strides to him with purpose, all serious expression and slick professional suit with a zeroed in focus aimed at Eames. He’s already hot under the collar just from that.

“Ah, it seems my esteemed friend with benefits has come to whisk me away for the evening,” Eames says, tossing back the last of his drink. The statement is aimed at the pretty young thing by his side, but his gaze stays firmly locked on Arthur.

“Not sure you could call us ‘friends’,” Arthur quips.

“My apologies, my fuck colleague is here and he has business for me to attend to.” He stands and sweeps his arm out. “Lead the way.”

Arthur does and he waits until the doors of the elevator close to say, “Fuck colleague?”

“Possibly presumptuous of me, but I took the ‘not friends’ to mean coworkers, rather than enemies. But if you’re looking for a thrilling roleplay in which I’m your sworn nemesis you wish to defeat, yet feel overwhelming sexual attraction towards, I’m sure that can be arranged.”

Eames is expecting Arthur to be smiling, or at least offering a tease of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, tempting Eames to keep pushing until he gets a full proper one. It’s usually how their private banter goes. Instead, Arthur’s still by all appearances in work mode. Serious and professional and perhaps a bit irritated. “Your offer is noted, but won’t be necessary, thank you.”

“Suit yourself,” Eames says easily, wondering if something went wrong with the last of Arthur’s cleanup. It can’t have gone catastrophically wrong or Arthur’d have warned him and they’d be on the run already. So probably something more along the lines of a minor annoyance. That’s something Eames can help distract him from.

They get into Arthur’s room and Eames makes himself at home, shrugging off his jacket and seating himself on the bed in what he knows is a rather appealing sprawl. He appears casual, but is positioned just so to emphasize his physical form. It draws the eye without being too blatantly in your face.

Instead of appearing enticed, Arthur ignores him and takes his own jacket off, hanging it up and then busying himself with the fiddly details like removing his cufflinks. He’d done himself up fully today, knowing that the client would see him. He’s not as fussy as some seem to think, but he does care about professional impressions.

Eames watches, noting the rigidity of his spine, the careful yet snappish way he’s ridding himself of his various accoutrements. He decides perhaps lewder is the way to go, shock Arthur out of his head and distract him from whatever his source of tension is. So he unbuttons his shirt and spreads his thighs, one hand behind himself with the palm spread across the bed so he can lean back against it, and the other he cups over his cock through his trousers, starting to fondle himself slowly. “I do adore this striptease, if you weren’t so good at your job I’d suggest you look into burlesque.”

Arthur turns to look at him and frowns. It’s not a very encouraging reaction, but Eames knows sometimes one must just press on. He continues to palm himself slowly, arching his back and biting his lip. Putting on a show for Arthur.

Arthur, who doesn’t seem to be appreciating the spectacle Eames is trying to create for him. He gives it another few moments before he decides to fold and switch tactics. Rebuttoning his shirt feels too much like a full retreat so he leaves it open, but he removes his hand from his crotch and sits up properly again. “Would you like to discuss what’s put you in such a mood?”

“I’m not in a mood.”

“Ah, my mistake.” Direct confrontation either pays off immediately, or it throws a wrench in the works that takes a long time to undo. Subtle, Eames thinks, ease in. “Have you had dinner yet? Perhaps we should order room service.”

“I ate.”

“Ah.” Arthur’s not giving him much to work with here. “The job went well…” Maybe if he starts off on the positives, they’ll get around to whatever this mood is and work past it.

Arthur gives a noncommittal hum.

“The client seemed pleased.”

“He was.”

Eames nods. This is going nowhere fast. Time for another role.

Sex again, but perhaps he didn’t go far enough the first time. Maybe Arthur’s looking for a push, something more blatant and harder to ignore. He stands and makes his way over to Arthur, an easy sway to his walk and a self satisfied grin on his face. He’s leisurely, like he has all the time in the world, and confident. A predator assured of the capture of his prey.

“I’ve been thinking about this all day…” He reaches out and runs just the tips of his fingers along the waistline of Arthur’s trousers, then slips two in, tugging ever so slightly. “You want to get on your knees for me, darling?”

The question’s barely out of his mouth before Arthur’s snatched his hand and turned it at the wrist. It’s jarring and Eames inhales sharply, but Arthur eases his hold before any actual damage can be done. Arthur releases his hand and Eames wrings it out, feeling over his wrist. He knows it’s fine, but there’s still an impulse to touch. To soothe the momentary sting.

Arthur’s looking at him in what seems to be a challenge, daring him to do something, to react.

He should’ve given that ‘not friends’ comment more weight, not brushed it off so fast. It seems Arthur’s looking for something with the edge of a hatefuck and he’s refusing to outright ask. It’s not what Eames usually goes for, but he can certainly provide.

He sighs. “If you wanted a fight and fuck you could’ve had it sooner if you’d just provided a little _clarity_.” He grabs Arthur’s wrist as he says the last word and pulls, using the momentum to spin Arthur and wrench his arm up behind his back. Not hard enough to hurt, just enough to make him feel that he’s been pinned.

As expected Arthur’s instincts kick in and he executes a clever little move where he uses leverage to his advantage and is able to sweep one of Eames’ legs out. Eames feels it happening and drops to a controlled roll, taking Arthur with him. They wrestle about on the floor until Arthur gets the upper hand, his forearm braced against Eames’ throat.

They’re both panting and while technically they could go longer, Eames is ready to move on to the next part of the evening. He bucks his hips up, grinding rather than trying to throw Arthur off him. He expects Arthur to push back and to shift from grappling to sex, but instead Arthur lets go and gets up, brushing his hands over his trousers like he’s ridding them of dust.

Eames stays on the ground, but watches Arthur warily.

“Well, if you’ve gotten that out of your system now,” Arthur says.

“Out of _my_ —?” Eames breaks off, incredulous and confused. He blinks a few times. He isn’t sure what the game is, unless it’s just for Arthur to act as contrarian as possible. Which, given how Arthur is now standing and watching him haughtily, may just be the case. “Of course. I’m all done now.” He smiles pleasantly, just a little submissive.

“Are you?”

Eames nods, gets up from the ground and moves to kneel. He looks up at Arthur deferentially, waiting for Arthur to give more rules. Once again, a little clarity would have been nice, but Eames is good at adapting to a situation. Maybe that’s part of the point for Arthur, to try to throw him off. Eames can work with that.

So he sits there on his heels, quiet and obedient, just waiting for Arthur’s next move. It should tell him a lot about how he needs to act for the rest of the evening.

Arthur watches him, then walks away, casual. Unaffected and nonchalant. Likely an act, itself, and that tells Eames something. He files it away, that Arthur is taking on a superior role. But rather than overt dominance, it’s an affected disinterest.

“Yusuf’s new compounds are coming along,” Arthur says.

It sounds at first like a non sequitur, but Eames suspects it’s a furthering of this false disinterest role. He hums. “The man does enjoy his experiments.”

“The newest one was interesting. The… lowering of defenses.”

Eames stays on his knees for now, as it seems Arthur’s settled into this dynamic. “If he refines it and we’re able to target it, it could have applications on marks.”

Arthur nods and settles himself on the armchair in the room, his legs spread as he slouches more comfortably. Eames smiles and shuffles over, he thinks he’s got this situation pegged now.

“It’s interesting,” Arthur continues, watching Eames settle between his legs, “What it reveals.”

That sends a warning signal up Eames’ spine, but he represses it and focuses on the task at hand. The role he’s determined he must be. “Very,” he says, then leans in to start undoing Arthur’s trousers.

“Stop forging,” Arthur snaps.

It shocks Eames enough that he freezes for a moment, unsure what to say or do. “Arthur… do you need to check your totem?” He asks carefully.

“What? No, I know we aren’t dreaming.”

“Then… you know I can’t currently forge, yes?”

“I—yes. That’s not exactly what I meant. I know you can’t _forge_ , but you can… act.”

“Ah.” Eames sits back on his heels again. “And you didn’t like how I was acting?”

“I don’t want you to _act_. But you never stop, do you?”

No, no, he doesn’t. The truth, but seemingly the wrong answer. He hesitates slightly, casting about for what the _right_ answer might be, the one that Arthur’s looking for.

Arthur watches him and sighs. “Just stop acting.”

Eames smiles, pleasant and accommodating. “Of course.”

“I mean it.”

The smile turns into more of a smirk. That’s probably more along the lines of what Arthur’s looking for. Eames has a certain ego to him, a certain delight in teasing.

Arthur just frowns.

“Come, darling, it can’t be as bad as all that, surely?” He keeps the smirk and adds a flirtatious tint to his teasing.

But Arthur won’t stop frowning. Not even a scowl, something based in annoyance that Eames can tease and poke at until he’s drawn out whatever Arthur had on his mind and distracted him into a better mood. This is a proper frown, indicating not just a temporary mood, but something deeper, more serious. 

It makes Eames a little edgy. Arthur gets in his moods sometimes, sure, but the seriousness is more typical of Arthur at work. Arthur working through problems, deadly problems.

Eames isn’t sure if he should be teasing more, or settling to match the serious nature of Arthur’s gaze. He starts one way, increasing his smirk to an almost leer and sees Arthur’s eyes darken, so quick as that he alters course and goes the other way. Tames his expression and changes his posture. The changes are minute, but present. Noticeable to Eames, who makes study of human behaviour and expression, and to Arthur, who catalogues details with his ever watching eye.

Arthur looks more disturbed than pleased and before Eames has a chance to decide what role to play now, he speaks, “You can’t help it, can you?”

Eames feels like a popped balloon, a great burst of something, what, he isn’t sure, perhaps everything, leaving him. Left behind is him, the hollow shell. No longer full of all the behaviours and motions and thoughts he brings together to build the people he pretends to be. “I don’t know who you want me to be right now.” It’s the truth, and a more vulnerable truth than he would ever normally say. Certainly, he can’t remember the last time he was this forthright and without pretense.

“Yourself!”

Which is exactly the heart of the issue, isn’t it?

Eames stands and steps back, giving them a buffer of space. “And who, pray tell, is that?”

“I don’t know! I think I’d like to know! Normal people usually _know_ who they’ve been fucking.” Arthur’s standing now too, worked up and all confrontation.

“Awful lot of working girls in this world would beg to disagree.”

“So that’s what this is, then? I’m the john?”

Eames sees two options before him. Say yes, say it’s just easy casual sex and move on. Maybe push hard on the sex work angle and say something cutting about their roles and money from jobs. Doing that will likely push Arthur away, there’s a risk of losing him. The other option is to pull back the mask, take off the armor and face up to Arthur, to this thing between the two of them. If Eames does that, it will be the most vulnerable thing he’s done in as long as he can remember.

“Have you ever not acted with me?”

Eames takes a deep breath and closes his eyes for a moment, trying to steady himself, see if there’s some internal answer to this that he can draw out if he just focuses.

“This was a test, you know.”

Eames opens his eyes again. “A test?”

“It’s not that I didn’t know you put on roles, but I was trying to see how constant it was. Seems it truly is always.”

“I think I need another drink if we’re going to have this talk,” Eames says. He’s buying himself time and liquid courage and also using it to gauge Arthur’s mood, his receptiveness.

Arthur looks like he’s about to say something cutting, so Eames puts his hand up. “I’m not being flippant. I mean I’d like a few fingers of scotch in me before we delve into… this. If it’s all the same to you.”

Arthur’s mouth shuts and he considers for a moment, then gives a terse nod.

Eames investigates the minibar, it’s the same selection as could be found in his own room. He sighs, lamenting the lack of decent choice and pulls a few mini bottles for himself. He downs one, then looks at Arthur. “Want something?”

Arthur considers for a moment, then says, “Some vodka if you’re taking all the whiskey.”

Eames nods and pulls the vodkas for Arthur, tossing them gently his way, one after the next. Arthur catches them easily and drinks one.

They stare at each other in silence and Eames thinks to hell with it and polishes off the rest of the bottles he’d grabbed for himself. Arthur watches him, but only indulges in one more himself.

The tension is thick and the silence is loud, but Arthur’s respecting that Eames asked for a moment to center himself. He knows Arthur’s pissed at him, even if he isn’t precisely sure of why, beyond the obvious. That it has something to do with how he… is. He appreciates Arthur’s willingness to allow him the time and the drinks before pushing for more. Perhaps it’s that, more than the alcohol, that makes him feel somewhat ready to speak.

Though, the alcohol certainly doesn’t hurt.

“I’ve never been exactly… whole,” he says, hesitating some on the last word.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Try me.”

Eames frowns, not upset with Arthur, but rather furrowing his brow in concentration. It’s something inherent to himself and yet, so difficult to verbalize. “I’m… I’ve always been more of a concept than a person.”

“A concept?”

Eames nods. “An idea. A group of ideas, possibilities. Concepts.”

“You mean that you’re… fluid?” Arthur isn’t really looking angry now, more interested.

“I suppose.”

“That you change?”

“Sure, but it’s more than that.”

Arthur waits for him to continue and Eames allows himself to smile the bitter little smile he’s felt wanting to be released. “I’m not sure this is something you actually want to hear about.”

“I do.”

Eames sighs. “It’s… a person is a self, yes? You have a… self. A being, a person that you are. The inherent sense of self, of… being. I don’t—I mean, I exist within a single physical body, so therefore there must be a… me. But I don’t know that that ‘me’ is a… well, a stable person unto themselves. Myself.”

Arthur’s watching him, looking like the textbook example of an engaged audience.

“I’m not like that. I’m fluid and I change, yes, but people can do that too. I don’t have a person that I am outside of that.”

“Aren’t you Eames?”

“For now.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m Eames at the moment, but I haven’t always been Eames, and I might not always be.”

“So Eames is a role?”

“Yes.”

“And you are…?”

Eames smiles, a little bitter, a little rueful, but not spiteful. “No one, really. I am Eames, until I’m someone else.”

Arthur’s looking a little frustrated now, but still not angry, not like he was earlier. “Well… if you stopped being Eames, who would you be?”

“I don’t know, whoever I had to create given whatever circumstances led to me stopping being Eames.”

“But—”

Eames cuts him off, “If I had to burn Eames, if that identity got too hot, I’d do it. But I’d immediately create someone new to be and become them. And then I would be them. The point is that until that happens, I am Eames, but I’m also… not. I created him to be him and I am, but I’m not… inherently him. I have the identities I create, but I don’t have a… between identities person that I am. I am whatever role I’ve created.”

“So between jobs you’re still Eames?”

Eames nods.

“And you’re saying you don’t think you have a personality outside the roles, like Eames?”

Eames nods again.

“Doesn’t that mean that… Eames _is_ who you are?”

Eames frowns. “Sort of, but not exactly. It’s… I mean I _am_ Eames. But not inherently, not as a self. It’s…” He sighs. He’s trying to explain, but Arthur is a person, he doesn’t seem to really get it. He surely adapts himself some to given circumstances, everyone does, especially in their line of work. You need to have a persona on the job, keep your secrets and aspects of your non-work personality to yourself. But just because Arthur’s versed in holding parts of himself back, doesn’t mean he can grasp what Eames is saying.

“Is the canvas upon which the Mona Lisa sits, a painting?” Eames asks, hoping the metaphor will illuminate the concept more.

“What?”

“The blank canvas. Is that a painting, or a vessel _for_ a painting?”

“A… vessel, I guess.”

Eames snaps his fingers. “Precisely. I’m a canvas. And my consciousness is… the artist I suppose. Who creates the paintings, the people. But I’m not inherently them. I’m just the vessel.”

Arthur nods and drinks another mini bottle of vodka. “Well…” He says after a moment, “Your mom seemed to know you. The you you… were.”

“My nanny.”

“What?”

“I assume you’re talking about my projection?”

Arthur nods.

“She was my nanny, not my mother. Though, she may as well have been. I certainly wanted her to be.”

“Oh?”

“I used to practice her accent,” Eames says, running an idle finger over the threaded cap of one of his empty mini whiskeys, “Had a whole fantasy about how she’d take me and we’d secret ourselves away on a boat and sail back to her family in Ireland. I practiced sounding like her so I’d fit in. I’d create myself into a son for her and we’d live happily ever after far, far away where no one would ever find us.”

“So you’ve always felt like this?” Arthur asks, and there’s a certain softness to his voice now. Not pity, but some type of sympathy. Something more understanding, more tender. It’s worlds away from his earlier frustration.

“Yes.”

They lapse into silence and as it stretches on, Eames feels himself turn introspective. Where do they go from here? Do they move on, acting as usual? Do they address it further, and if so, in what way? He can’t say he regrets this exactly, but he isn’t a fan of this uncertainty they’re now left with.

Arthur comes to a decision first, approaching him and reaching out. He lays a hand on Eames’ shoulder, his thumb rubbing back and forth soothingly. “May I?”

Eames doesn’t want this to set some sort of precedent of fragility, he wants Arthur to treat him as he always has. So instead of answering, he leans in and initiates the kiss himself, that should be answer enough. To his gratification Arthur doesn’t hesitate in kissing back, doesn’t try to pull away and talk more, instead he responds immediately, letting himself get drawn into the kiss.

It’s a little slower and more tender than the kisses Eames had anticipated having tonight, but that’s alright too. They can work up to more passion.

It doesn’t take long now that they’ve got their hands on each other. They follow the familiar dance of kissing and touching, moving from standing to intertwined on the bed. Rucking up layers to reach underneath and grasp at bare skin, but unlike usual they aren’t undressing, just pushing their clothes out of the way in order to touch.

It isn’t frantic, not like the adrenaline fueled sex that comes from a brush with death, which is more typically the circumstances when they remain clothed, but it is intense. They stay in each other’s space, clinging and unwilling to give an inch. Their legs are tangled together, but they manage to get just enough room to pull their cocks from their trousers and grind against each other.

It’s been a long time since Eames last indulged in frottage that wasn’t a precursor to another act, but he finds himself enjoying it. The inherent youthful sense of the act, the instinctual and unpolished motions, the clear desire they have for each other. They only stop kissing long enough to gasp out breaths, and even that is only as much as they need, no more. Arthur’s moving like a live wire against him and Eames wants only to cling tighter.

He isn’t quite sure who comes first, only that they both do, and even then they don’t pull apart. They sprawl together in an unwieldy sort of cuddle. Lacking in self-consciousness and only concerned with staying close. They do finally part to breathe more, though, and he watches Arthur pant open mouthed. His hair is mussed, sticking up in strange angles due to the product still doing its best to keep it in shape. There’s a faint blush across his cheeks and he looks utterly debauched.

He smiles at Eames and moves in to kiss him again, slower this time. Soft, simple, no tongue. He has one hand up the back of Eames’ shirt and strokes his lower back in a counterpoint to the kiss.

They stayed curled up like that, exchanging post-coital kisses, hands touching and soothing over skin with no impetus for anything further. They’ll get up in a bit to wash up, at least enough to sleep. Sweaty cum covered clothes don’t make the best pajamas. But for now they’re relaxed, sated and content to lie there.

“I’m sorry for testing you,” Arthur says after a bit, drawing back and sitting up.

Eames shrugs. “Can’t say I enjoyed it, but I understand why you did.”

“Still,” Arthur says, looking down at Eames where he’s still laid out beside him, “I know testing someone is… not as good as communicating.”

Eames reaches out and rubs his hand over Arthur’s thigh. Still clothed, though there’s cum on his trousers. The visual sends a faint spark of arousal through him. “You didn’t know if this was something I’d answer honestly about. I understand.”

Arthur looks like he’s about to say more, but then thinks better of it. His mouth quirks just a little, like he’s swallowing whatever words were about to come out, then he nods. He leans down and kisses Eames once more, a small peck, then gets off the bed. He stretches once he’s on his feet. “I should probably take a shower.”

Eames hums.

“You should too.”

“In the morning,” Eames says, stretching out on the bed. “Clean up enough to sleep and we’ll bathe in the morning and go out for breakfast and by the time we get back we’ll have fresh sheets to mess up all over again.”

Arthur considers this a moment. “Fine, but you’re sleeping in the wet spot.”

“I don’t think there is a wet spot, I do believe our shirts caught the worst of it.”

“Then mind you don’t get any on the covers when you take it off,” Arthur says, already walking into the bathroom.

Eames strips and tosses his clothes to the floor, and he does make sure not to rub any of the wet fabric across the bed. Arthur’s nude too by the time he returns, bearing a damp cloth that he gives Eames to wipe himself down with. He even takes it back to the bathroom once Eames is done and Eames watches with a fond smile.

Arthur has an almost bashful smile when he returns for the second time, climbing into bed and watching Eames watch him. “What?”

“Nothing,” Eames says, not bothering to alter the surely rather dopey looking smile he can feel on his face. He’s too content to bother with it.

“Goodnight,” Arthur says, with a mock pointedness, slipping beneath the covers and waiting for Eames to turn off the light.

Eames does and settles under the covers beside Arthur. They don’t curl up tightly together like before, but they are comfortably in each other’s space. It’s a much looser form of cuddling, warm and relaxed. Eames is already thinking about tomorrow, how much he’s looking forward to a relaxed breakfast out and then bringing Arthur back to the hotel for round two. And three if things go according to plan.

“Go to sleep,” Arthur murmurs, “I can hear you thinking from over here.”

Eames huffs out a laugh that’s more breath than noise and presses a kiss to the nearest part of Arthur he can find in the dark, his shoulder as it turns out. “My apologies.” He closes his eyes and it isn’t long before he finds himself drifting off to sleep, soothed by Arthur’s presence by his side and his deep breathing in his ear.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had hoped to get this chapter up before now, but I must say it’s been a rather trying January. Here’s hoping February brings better news and less stress. Thanks to everyone who commented on chapter one!
> 
> PS One bit of good news, I just found out that I’m being taken to The French Laundry by my own dear companion (who I will not leave for Thomas Keller, no matter his genius). As I now apparently create my own future via writing for Eames I may need to reevaluate any angst I have planned for him.

For all of Eames’ eyebrow waggling and offers to _help_ , he and Arthur have separate showers in the morning.

Neither of them bother with grooming beyond basic hygiene and Eames hopes Arthur finds his mess of cowlicks as enticing as he does Arthur’s slight curls. They’re both dressing down, casual but nice. Eames is trying to determine which shirt he wants, when he feels Arthur’s gaze on him and looks over.

Arthur looks speculative and not particularly put out at having been caught staring. Eames has an innuendo about giving him a show on the tip of his tongue, but Arthur speaks before he can say it. “Have you ever thought about trying to figure it out?”

“Hm?”

“Your identity.”

Eames pauses, frozen in place as he shifts gears from flirtation to the more serious subject of the night before.

“Sorry,” Arthur says.

“No, it’s fine.” Eames shifts a little, he’s not exactly uncomfortable with the line of questioning, but he also wasn’t expecting it to come up again before they even had breakfast. “I mean, I have tried in the past I suppose.”

“Mm?”

“Introspection and whatnot, but as I said there isn’t really…” He sighs.

Arthur’s still watching him and he doesn’t know what to say. It’s too early for this, he hasn’t had time to think.

“What if you had help?” Arthur asks.

“What?”

“When you tried before, it was alone?”

Eames nods.

“Well, what if… you tried with someone to help you?”

“Are you trying to send me to therapy? Because I have been before.”

“I—no—you’ve been to therapy?”

“Sure,” Eames says with an easy shrug, “I’ve a whole load of issues, I’ve been told.”

Arthur blinks a few times. “Well… no, I wasn’t talking about therapy.”

“Oh?”

“I meant… well, I’ve been thinking of taking a vacation.”

“Alright,” Eames says, a little unsure what one has to do with the other.

“From dreamshare, I mean. Temporary, just a vacation. Some time off from all the… work, stress…”

“Worrying about being gunned down by a vengeful mark?” Eames asks with a smile.

“Yeah,” Arthur says, smiling back. “I have enough money after the Fischer job to be set for the foreseeable future and unless your spending habits are unthinkably out of control, I assume you do as well.”

Eames nods.

“So… maybe you’d like a vacation too? And maybe if you… if you tried with someone, maybe you could… figure some things out? If you wanted. A vacation would be nice regardless, though.”

“You’re asking me on holiday with you?”

Arthur nods. He isn’t acting bashful, but Eames can tell there’s some hesitance there. Not about asking, but rather, about how his proposal may be received.

They’re fuckbuddies who’ve been flirting around the idea of being more, testing and teasing at boundaries without crossing the line to actual commitment. Eames could press now, see how far before Arthur would be forced to give an answer one way or another. To name whatever this is. It would be a good way to get Arthur to back off, to apply pressure to this tender nebulous _thing_ between them.

But he doesn’t want to. He wants this, wants Arthur. Wants whatever this is with Arthur.

No one else would have thought to make an offer like Arthur just has, this unspoken more, this interest beyond a quick night. He may have couched it in defensive excuses of vacations and breaks from the demands of dreamshare, but they both know it’s more than that.

Neither of them will say it though.

Instead, Eames nods. “Okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Why not?” Predictably, comfortably flippant.

It’s a nice restaurant they’ve picked for breakfast. The type of place that has French on the menu and elegant bistro decor. The dishware toes the line of fine china and the floor’s done in old fashioned black and white hex tile, the little tiny ones with dark grout. The walls are cream and there’s gold accents and a dark wood bar and burnished mirrors abound. There isn’t a single dish that costs less than two digits, unless you count the sides—and even some of those are in the double digits.

The maître d’ reminds Eames a bit of Mal. Her effortless French girl chic, timeless without trying too hard. There’s a certain elegance to her that seems to transcend whatever circumstance she’s in, Mal had that in spades. She seats them at an intimate two top and it doesn’t take long for their waitress to come over.

Arthur orders a cup of coffee and eggs Benedict.

Eames orders a veritable feast. Coffee, a mimosa, polenta and eggs Basquaise with Rosette de Lyon, French toast with brandy caramelized apples and Chantilly cream, and a side of fresh berries.

“You’re never going to eat all that,” Arthur says once the waitress walks away.

Eames gives him a wolfish grin. “You’ve caused me to work up an appetite.”

Arthur rolls his eyes in response, but he’s smiling.

“Besides, I like to—”

“Taste, I know,” Arthur finishes for him.

Which is true, and Eames is a little flattered that Arthur has noticed. He knows it’s wasteful to order more than you can eat, but he can never seem to help himself. He likes to taste, to experience. When he looks at a menu he sees so many possibilities and he can’t limit himself to a single dish. In an ideal world all restaurants would offer a tasting menu in addition to the standard dishes.

“I should take you to The French Laundry sometime,” Arthur says, all offhand and nonchalant, sipping his coffee the waitress just delivered to their table.

Eames pauses in the middle of fixing his own cup and stares at him. “You absolutely _must_ take me to The French Laundry sometime. Don’t take that tone at me,” he says, noticing Arthur hiding a grin behind his mug. “Don’t be absurd, like that’s a question. That’s where we’re going on holiday, I’ll have you know. As of right now.”

“Have you been?”

“Of course I’ve been. Having been doesn’t mean anything in regards to future trips. Their tasting menu is _ever changing_.”

“First stop California.”

“First stop?”

“Well, I hope we can go more than one place, unless you decide to leave me for Thomas Keller.”

“I might. The man’s a genius.”

“So barring that you somehow slip into the kitchen and seduce Keller while I wine and dine you at his restaurant, we’ll continue on to someplace else after that.”

Eames nods, finishing fixing his coffee. “Unless you already have a reservation it won’t be our first stop.”

“True, but we’ll make it one of the stops. I’ll get us the first reservation available and we’ll plan the trip around that. Any ideas?”

Eames shrugs. “Nothing in particular comes to mind, though if we’re headed to California I wouldn’t say no to some time in Vegas.”

“We can do Vegas.”

“And a beach.”

“And a beach,” Arthur agrees.

Eames spots the waitress returning, her arms laden with their plates, and starts shifting things around on the table to make space. It’s cramped, but they manage to fit it all. It looks like a magazine spread, an offering of dishes to show the restaurant’s versatility, the talent of the chefs.

He digs in eagerly, moving from dish to dish, eating small bites as he samples each. It’s delicious and he hums in appreciation.

“Good?” Arthur asks.

“Excellent. And yours?”

“Excellent. The eggs are poached perfectly.”

“Good.”

The meal is companionable, comfortable silences for eating broken up with easy small talk. Arthur ends up tasting bits of Eames’ meal at his insistence and shows appreciation, though he sticks with finishing his eggs Benedict. He’s like that, though, which Eames appreciates. He likes something classic, executed to perfection, and he’s focused enough to see it through to the end. Maybe getting that from Arthur’s love of eggs Benedict is a little too psychoanalytical, but Eames thinks it’s true nonetheless.

Arthur’s mind must also be on psychology, as the next thing he says after a stretch of silence is, “I have anxiety.”

Eames raises an eyebrow.

“I was diagnosed as a kid.”

“Oh?”

“I just—you’re trusting me, telling me these things about you. I wanted to… show you it’s reciprocal. I have anxiety—bad. I’ve figured out what works for me now, how to live with it. But when I was a kid it was really bad.”

“Thank you for telling me.” Eames is thankful and touched by the gesture. He understands what it means for Arthur to tell him this. To trust him with something vulnerable.

“Thank you for telling _me_ about your… identity issues?”

Eames nods. He can hear Arthur’s hesitation over what to call it, but he doesn’t have any better label than ‘identity issues’ himself so he doesn’t offer an alternative. It’s likely what he’d call it were he to reference it, though prior to the night before that wasn’t something he was in the habit of.

“Did you want to pursue that?”

Eames leans back in his chair and sips his mimosa, considering. “What do you envision that entailing?”

“Well… what if we figure out consistencies? Things that stay the same with the people you make for yourself.”

“Arthur, I’ve been everyone from an aging businessman to a trophy wife. An eccentric dealer, a sweet doting daughter, a cutthroat lawyer…”

“I don’t mean any forges or anything you’ve done specific to a certain job. Just the ones you’ve made for yourself to be.”

“Mm. Right, well, that does narrow it down, but it’s still a rather varied list.”

“That’s okay, just think about it.”

They sit in silence, Arthur sipping his coffee and looking at something on his phone.

It takes a bit, but then, “Clothes,” Eames says.

“Clothes?” Arthur sets his phone down immediately. It’s clear that he wasn’t looking at anything of any interest and was rather just trying to give Eames some time to think without the pressure of being stared at. Eames hides his smile at the gesture behind the rim of his glass, taking a sip and then nodding.

“The people I make for me always wear vintage clothes. Different styles and eras, but… always from secondhand shops.”

Arthur nods. “Okay, yeah, that’s definitely something unique and specific to you. You like vintage clothes.”

“Is this the basis of my personality, then? A fondness for old clothing?”

Arthur waves a hand dismissively. “It’s something. We’ll figure out more.”

“Such as?”

Arthur’s eyes suddenly narrow, his easy breakfast companion air dropping as he becomes every bit the ruthless point man everyone in dreamshare knows. “Your accent—yours or forged?”

Eames laughs, oddly delighted that Arthur’s using tactics to try to interrogate him over their meal. It’s so out of place amongst their fellow diners, all concerned with food and conversation and with no idea that any danger lurks. Not that it really does. In that Arthur won’t do anything, not in that Arthur isn’t dangerous. 

He’s fairly certain Arthur doesn’t even mean anything serious by the switch in tactics, he thinks Arthur just means to try to shock an answer out of him. He’s pleased by the attempt, though in control of himself enough that he could lie if he wanted.

“My accent is my own,” he answers honestly.

Arthur nods, losing his edge, satisfied that Eames is being truthful, but he still looks interested in further information.

“I made Eames after a decently long stint as Mykhailo. I liked the idea of not having to adopt an accent for a while, give myself a bit of a break on that front at least. Plus, I did plan to be Eames for the foreseeable future and while I _can_ do accents, life is simpler when you don’t have to.”

“You pretended to be Russian?”

“Mykhailo was Ukrainian.” Eames pauses then, an odd expression on his face and he swallows hard a few times, before speaking again, “But please, call me Misha.” His voice is softer, and there’s an unmistakable Eastern European accent.

Arthur pauses, watching Eames. He doesn’t look displeased, but perhaps a little thrown. Eames waits to see how this will be received and is somewhat surprised when Arthur says, “Pleased to meet you, Misha.”

“And you. But I think this is unfair, I know you and you don’t know me.”

“I think I’d like to get to know you.”

Eames tilts his head. It feels a little odd to be Misha while wearing Eames’ clothes, it skews how settled he feels. Still, he knows how to be someone regardless of comfort. “Would you? What would you like to know?”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Odessa.”

“What did you want to be when you grew up?”

“Ah… the sea always called to me.”

“But you weren’t a sailor?”

“No.”

“Favorite food?”

Eames smiles. “Varenyky. But I’ll never say no to good borscht.”

“It’s odd…” Arthur says, looking him over carefully. “I know it’s you, but there’s… there _is_ something different. Not just the accent.”

“He looked a bit different too,” Eames says, dropping the accent and the posture he’d used for Misha. He holds himself like Eames again. “Different haircut, styled differently. And a different wardrobe. Felt a bit strange being him in Eames’ clothes.”

“What did he wear?”

“More monochromatic, lots of grey, slimmer tailoring… knits. He had a fondness for jumpers from the fifties.”

“How long were you him?”

“Little over a year.”

“You kept the accent and everything the whole time?”

Eames nods.

“What happened to him?”

“His life was a bit of a tragedy, really. He died alone in a warehouse in Malmö.” Eames shrugs. “It was a fitting end, he always was a little…”

“A little?” Arthur prompts after a moment.

“Melancholy. Lonely, I suppose. He had a hard time of it. You’d have liked him on a job though, he kept his head down. Efficient. Not interested in causing any sort of ruckus.”

Arthur reaches across the table and tangles his fingers together with Eames’ where they’re looped through the handle of his mug. It’s a surprising bit of PDA, not something Arthur’s particularly given to. “I may not mind a bit of ruckus.” He squeezes Eames’ fingers, then pulls his hand back.

“Only on occasion, though, I gather.”

Arthur’s lips quirk in a charmingly repressed little smile.

Eames drums his fingertips lightly against the side of his coffee mug, the fingers that Arthur just squeezed. “So, about our itinerary.”

Their first planned stop of the trip is Mexico. After some debate they decided it would be good to start with the beach. It’s been a while since Eames was last in Mexico and he’s excited for it. He’s excited for the beach in general though.

Their first actual stop is to go shopping before they even leave for Mexico. It strikes them that neither of them have actually planned their clothes around their new trip, everything in their suitcases is for the job they just worked.

Eames isn’t too badly off on that front, his wardrobe at the moment skews towards favoring Mombasa’s climate—plenty of linens and such. He’s fully prepared for the weather, though he doesn’t have anything for swimming. He reckons he should get something, he doesn’t think they’ll be staying at a nudist beach.

Arthur is a little worse off, given his proclivity to dress to impress at work. While very fashionable and attractive, suits aren’t exactly beachwear.

The two of them split off to handle their own shopping. Arthur, Eames assumes, is off in search of the casual lines of glossier labels. He likes clean, classic cuts with modern twists. It doesn’t have to be designer level, but he does favor high quality. Eames first goes to buy swimwear. Though he heavily favors vintage, it’s rather difficult to find vintage swimwear in suitable condition to wear. And even if it was easy, he’s not exactly sure he’d want to. It’s one of those things, like pants and socks, that you want to buy new. He may prefer clothes with history, but fabric going directly on his cock or feet is usually fabric he’d like to be the first to wear.

Once that’s done he does head directly to the nearest vintage shop and has a great time digging through their selection. Good vintage shops, like good used books stores, have a particular sort of smell to them. Something a little old and musty, a little floral and sweet, a little like mothballs. It’s very comforting and familiar. It’s a scent that relaxes him, makes him want to linger and bury himself deep in the aisles. Find some long forgotten corner and curl up in a pile of old furs and knits.

He leaves with a few new shirts and a carefully studied mental image of a particularly striking cocktail dress from the thirties. He wants to work it into a forge someday if he can. He has a whole mental wardrobe in addition to his physical one.

Arthur’s already finishing packing by the time Eames rejoins him in their room.

“We’re off already?”

Arthur nods. “I booked everything while you were still shopping.” He pauses a moment. “If that’s okay?”

“Please.” Eames waves his hand in a loose gesture he intends to indicate some form of dismissive encouragement. “Feel free to take care of the fussy details of the itinerary. I won’t stop you.”

“I just usually do the booking and planning—”

“You won’t find any argument from me. You are rather good at the research and planning.” He deposits his new shopping by his luggage and starts folding it. “Our flight leaves in?”

“Three hours.”

“I do hope you haven’t found some horrid little cut rate last minute old banger of an aeroplane.”

“First class.”

“Oh darling, you do spoil me so.”

Arthur checks his watch. “We should leave as soon as you’re packed. I hate rushing to make flights.”

“I know, we won’t be late. Don’t worry.” Eames finishes packing and does a last check around the room for any missed items. Undoubtedly redundant, there’s no way Arthur didn’t check already, but Eames feels better seeing for himself too. “Shall I call us a taxi while you check us out?”

Arthur nods.

They have plenty of time allotted for traffic and such, but they arrive rather promptly at the airport. Arthur’s connections, such as they are, provide them with an in at the special first class waiting area and Eames takes advantage to spread out in his seat and relax.

He has connections of his own if he wanted to pull strings, but some inner part of him does thrill at letting Arthur take charge of it.

They board the plane and Eames gets himself settled with a pillow and a drink. He’s not necessarily planning on sleeping, though Arthur’s presence at his side does mean sleeping in a public place like a plane should be safe, but he is planning on being extremely comfortable for the duration of the flight. Arthur settles in too, but he opts for a blanket over his lap in addition to the pillow.

Arthur’s scribbling away in one of his many little moleskines while Eames flirts with the flight attendant. He doesn’t mean anything by it, he just enjoys the game of it. He does in this instance make sure to keep it light and playful, in deference to the flight attendant’s position as someone who must for the sake of her job be locked in a small cabin with him for hours. He doesn’t want to make her feel uneasy so he keeps it a little absurd, so she knows he isn’t serious.

She, in turn, is delightfully playful back and proves to be a charming verbal sparring partner.

They chat every time she comes by and Eames regales her with compliments and little details of the trip he and Arthur have planned. Nothing too concrete, but he does say that Arthur’s spoiling him, whisking him off to a foreign beach.

“You’re a shameless flirt,” she says the next time she brings him a drink.

“Moi?” Eames says with a gasp, laying his hand over his chest in mock dismay.

She looks at Arthur. “Your boyfriend’s a real Casanova, huh? Must be a lot to put up with.”

Eames pauses a moment. The word ‘boyfriend’ looming large and bringing him to a halt. Though, he’s a good enough actor that he doesn’t let it show. Besides, he did rather bring it on himself, he realizes. All that talk of his shared plans with Arthur, how Arthur spoils him, how he’s been periodically stealing snacks and such from Arthur’s tray.

Arthur has yet to react so he decides the best way to handle it is tackle it straight on, flippantly. Like it isn’t a thing at all. “Yes, my darling, my sweet,” he says in an overly saccharine tone, “However do you put up with me?”

“Saint-like patience,” Arthur says, deadpan.

The flight attendant laughs and walks away. But Eames is intrigued, he leans in and whispers in Arthur’s ear. “Am I a Casanova, then?” The words aren’t important, but his low suggestive tone and his breath across Arthur’s skin is.

Arthur shivers, just slightly, and Eames would be lying if he said that wasn’t his intended effect. But his original plan of nipping at the side of Arthur’s jaw until Arthur protests for public decency’s sake is sidetracked when he spots his own name in Arthur’s moleskine.

He drags his teeth gently over the back curve of Arthur’s jaw, just a tease to distract him, and reaches out to snatch the moleskine right out of Arthur’s hands. Arthur jolts and tries to hold it, but he’s too slow and it slips from his fingers. Eames sits back triumphantly.

“That was a dirty trick,” Arthur says with a frown.

“I’m a master of sleight of hand,” Eames says, “Besides,” He holds the notebook out of Arthur’s grasp when he reaches for it. “I saw my name, that means it concerns me.”

Arthur’s still frowning, but stops trying to grab for the book. “You know I write notes.”

“You’ve a little notebook on me?” Eames holds it up and shakes it back and forth slowly.

“And if I do?”

“I hope it’s good things. Does it say ‘Casanova’? It should. If it doesn’t, go ahead and jot that down.” He hands it back to Arthur, who takes it with a huff.

“I’m writing ‘unbearable jackass.'”

“Hm. If you’re writing about my arse it should be far more complimentary, I have evidence you like it.”

“Not what that means,” Arthur says, almost a little absently, as he goes about stashing the little notebook away.

“So you don’t deny it?” Eames asks, leaning in again.

“Deny what?”

“You enjoy my arse.”

“Was that ever in question?”

“No,” Eames says, settling back down in his seat. “I suppose not. Though I never say no to a compliment.”

“I’m wildly aware,” Arthur says mildly, settling in his seat as well and closing his eyes.

Arthur’s gotten them in some sort of luxury resort rather than a hotel. It isn’t one of those mainstream ones, full of families on holiday. It seems to mostly be couples and their accommodations are very luxe little cabins near the beach with a respectable distance between them. To allow the illusion of a private beach stay, Eames assumes. And to make loud sex a little easier on the neighbors.

There are restaurants on the resort’s grounds as well as bars and some sort of nightclub spot, so really they don’t need to leave the premises unless they wish. While it’s true there’s a convenience to that, which he’s sure Arthur had in mind when making the reservation, Eames does like to check out the local scene when he travels so he plans to drag them into the city at some point. Ideally he’d like to shuck off the tourist trappings and insert himself in some seedy local casino, but it’s yet to be determined how interesting Arthur will find that prospect.

And anyway, he’s ready to enjoy the bounty of the resort itself first.

Eames refuses to button up a single one of his shirts from the moment they check in at the resort. Arthur pretends to act bothered by this at first, as if Eames can’t see him blatantly appreciating the view, but Arthur drops it after the first couple days. Eames knows it had more to do with Arthur enjoying pitching small fits over inconsequential things on occasion than truly offended sensibilities. Not that that stops Eames from teasing Arthur over said imagined sensibilities.

Besides, Eames is himself a strong believer in the art and catharsis of complaint. It’s one of the many reasons he and Arthur get on so well.

There’s a lovely couple of lounge style beach chairs under an umbrella set up on the stretch of beach in front of their cabin. They’ve made regular practice of sitting themselves there for hours, sipping drinks and making idle smalltalk as they enjoy doing absolutely nothing.

Eames has himself set up doing just that while Arthur’s on drink fetching duty. He’s shirtless and his tan is coming in nicely. He smirks lazily and lifts his sunglasses appreciatively as Arthur returns, drinks in hand. “I’ve had a dream like this…”

“You’ve been vacationing with a projection of me? I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“Figure of speech. The point is how attractive I find you and that this situation is something out of a fantasy.”

“This is your fantasy?”

“Mh-hm. I’m easily pleased.”

“Oh, sure, all it takes is an expensive vacation, letting you laze around, and waiting on you.”

“Yes, yes, I’m an incorrigible prima donna. Now come here,” Eames says, waving his hand in a lazy come hither motion.

Arthur snorts and takes a seat on the lounge chair beside Eames. “Spoiled brat.”

“Completely and utterly. Now come _here_ ,” Eames says, his voice trailing into a whine.

“I should withhold to teach you a lesson.”

“You won’t.”

Arthur looks at him consideringly. “Perhaps someday I will.”

“I fear the day.”

Arthur snorts again and leans over, obliging Eames in the kiss he’s been angling for, then settles into his own chair again.

“Yours is a piña colada, yes?”

“Yes,” Arthur says, taking a sip of his drink. It’s charmingly at odds, the image of Arthur the deadly point man in Eames’ head and Arthur the piña colada drinking tourist that sits before him. Not that Arthur’s engaging in any atrocious tourist behaviour, he’s still poised. He manages to look classy even relaxing on the beach.

“So what’s this, then? Blue Hawaii?” Eames holds his drink up and inspects it. It’s frozen, blue, and has a garnish of pineapple, maraschino cherries, and a jaunty little umbrella.

“I told the bartender to surprise me.”

“Hm.” Eames takes a test sip. “Oh, good lord.”

“Bad?”

“Good, but very sweet and _very_ alcoholic. Tastes of youthful indiscretions.”

“It’s vacation, you can have dessert drinks.”

Eames narrows his eyes at Arthur and takes a long drink from his straw. “I see, you’re trying to take advantage of my easy nature and get me plastered. You fiend.”

“Yes,” Arthur says, completely deadpan, “You’ve caught me. Whatever will I do?”

“Your devilish plan may yet come to fruition, but don’t let your guard down.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Eames hums and drinks more. It’s definitely one of those dangerously sweet sort of drinks that contains more alcohol than anything else. Something university students on holiday down before engaging in untold shenanigans. It’s also best before it has time to melt and Eames is planning on lying out in the sun for a while so he drinks it fast. Possibly a mite bit faster than is wise.

He can feel the loose tingle of slight inebriation once he’s got himself situated laid out on his stomach on a beach towel. He’s set himself up by their lounge chairs, which is where Arthur has stayed. He settles in to sun himself while Arthur sticks to the shade of their umbrella.

As the sun beats down on his back and the breeze ruffles his hair he reaches an almost meditative state. The sound of the surf crashing is soothing and he thinks he might be able to fall asleep right where he is.

He isn’t sure exactly how long has passed, but eventually he feels a presence at his side. Arthur kneeling down next to him. There’s the sound of the flip of a cap and then Arthur’s hands, coated in sunscreen, are rubbing over his back.

“You’ve moved onto phase two already…” Eames says drowsily.

“Hm?”

“Your devious plan. You’ve got me all laid out and now you get your hands all over me.”

“Or, I save you from a sunburn that would leave you unable to be touched for the rest of our stay. And you’re too much of a hedonist to abide that.”

“Oh, good looking out.”

“I’ve got your back.” Arthur says, rubbing sunscreen more firmly into Eames’ back to emphasize the play on words.

Eames doesn’t reply, he’s too busy enjoying the almost-massage. The sun is hot, but the breeze coming off the ocean is enough to keep it from being sweltering. He’s ever so slightly tipsy from what he’s sure is an absurd mix of alcohols in that blue concoction Arthur brought him and he’s got Arthur rubbing him down. He’s a little drowsy and a little turned on, but unsure which impulse he wants to follow first.

Arthur lets up on the pressure, apparently satisfied that Eames is once again protected from the evils of UV light, but he doesn’t move away. Instead, he starts tracing his fingers over Eames’ exposed skin. It takes a moment, but Eames realizes he’s following the patterns of Eames’ tattoos.

“I assume your tattoos have stories?”

He rolls over and squints up at Arthur, but the sun is too bright for him to see clearly. He starts patting around next to him with one hand blindly until he finds his sunglasses and puts them on. Arthur watches him and doesn't move away. “They do, yes.”

“They’re all so… different,” Arthur says, reaching out again to touch one on Eames’ chest.

“Yes, well, different people with different tastes got them.”

Arthur looks back up at Eames. “Really? So you… the people you’ve been have gotten different ones?”

“Yes.”

“That does explain the… _varied_ styles.”

Eames snorts at Arthur’s attempt to say that politely. He suspects if Arthur didn’t know they were in some shape or another tied up in the ‘identity thing’ he wouldn’t have been quite so tactful. “Not a fan?”

“I think several of them are… questionable. But I like some of them.” Arthur sits back a little. “Isn’t it… I mean, isn’t it a little strange to mark yourself permanently as different people? Especially if none of them is really you and you might change?”

“Well, those people were me at the time and…” Eames sighs. “I don’t know… I guess it’s a little strange, but they were all pieces of me. Or I was pieces of them, I don’t know. But the tattoos… they do each mean something to those people, they had reasons to get them. It’s all marks of… people I have been, even if I’m not them now and may never be again.”

“It shows your journey?”

“I suppose.”

“Which was your first?”

Eames points to a little Celtic knot on his chest. It’s rather faded, obviously old.

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Oh, rebel.”

Eames laughs. “Did you expect anything else?”

“No,” Arthur says, then leans in and kisses him.

Eames kisses back eagerly, the slight arousal from before taking precedence over his slight sleepiness. “You keep this up,” he says, speaking between kisses, “And I won’t be in a fit state for public decency much longer.”

Arthur hums against his lips. “I guess I should get you back to our room before you cause a scandal.”

“Only if you plan to be scandalous with me behind closed doors.”

“That can be arranged,” Arthur says, pulling back. “But first you need to shower and get all that sunscreen off.”

Eames makes an affronted noise. “Might I remind you of who just slathered me in it? Don’t act as if this is on me.”

Arthur’s already standing and gathering their things. “Woe is you.”

Eames follows at a slightly slower pace and heads straight to the shower upon entering their little cabin. Really, he doesn’t mind. The sunscreen is a greasy film that isn’t a particularly pleasant feeling. He can’t imagine it tastes good either and he’d prefer Arthur have unrestricted access to mouthing over whatever part of Eames strikes his fancy.

He doesn’t bother with anything other than drying off and wrapping the towel around his waist to return to the bedroom. He considered going out nude, but he likes the intrigue of stripping, even if his only layer is a simple piece of cloth. He leans in the doorway and smirks at Arthur, angling his body to emphasize his muscles. “So what now?”

“Now I shower.”

“We couldn’t have done that together?”

“Wouldn’t have been very productive.”

“On the contrary, I think it would have been _extremely_ productive.”

“I’ll make it worth your while,” Arthur says with a smirk. He brushes close by Eames as he walks into the bathroom, pausing to run a hand down Eames’ chest and stopping right at the edge of the towel. He hooks two fingers in right above Eames’ crotch and gives it a little tug. “Be ready for me.” Then he gives Eames a gentle shove out of the doorway and closes the bathroom door behind him.

Eames grins to himself and gets everything set up. The covers pulled down from where they were tucked in, lube and condoms in easy reach, himself lounging at the center of the bed. He keeps the towel on at first, then pulls it off as he contemplates what Arthur meant by ‘ready’. He strokes himself slowly, almost absent mindedly, as he wonders what Arthur might be planning. For he doesn’t have any doubt that Arthur has a plan. He keeps his touch on his cock light, a mere tease. Both because he’s not interested in actually tossing himself off and because he doesn’t want to do anything rigorous enough to necessitate lube. It wouldn’t do to get his cock all lubed up only to find Arthur wishes to blow him.

Though, now that he’s thinking about lube he wonders if he should finger himself a bit. Once again, slightly more specificity as to what ‘ready’ entailed wouldn’t have gone amiss. He grins again as he thinks the word ‘specificity’, a private joke that he appreciates knowing Arthur’s just in the other room.

There’s a small billow of steam when Arthur opens the bathroom door. The little beach cabin, while very luxurious, is small and not necessarily up to the task of quickly ventilating the steam of two back to back showers. Arthur’s dried himself off and left his towel behind, Eames can see he’s already well on his way to hard.

“You ready for me?” Arthur asks, crawling up onto the bed.

Eames grins and spreads his legs out more for Arthur to settle between. He doesn’t stop lazily stroking himself and he delights in watching Arthur’s eyes track the movement. “Ready to take whatever you give me.”

Arthur hums and reaches out, knocking Eames’ hand away from his cock. “No more of that.” 

Eames tucks his hands behind his head and waits to see what Arthur will do next.

Arthur grabs Eames’ cock with a firm hand around the shaft and traces his thumb right along the edge of Eames’ foreskin, smiling at Eames’ sharp intake of breath. He has a fascination with Eames’ foreskin, no doubt due to the lack of one of his own. He likes to tease at it, run his tongue along it, suck and stroke and do all manner of delightful things. Eames is more than happy to provide the novel experience and receive the benefits of Arthur’s intrigue.

Arthur takes his time, firm strokes of his hand up and down and teasing licks of his tongue wherever his hand isn’t. He moves slowly and takes the time to kiss and suck at Eames’ inner thighs, down to Eames’ balls, then back up to suck at the head in a way that has Eames arching off the bed from the intensity of the sensation. 

He moves to blowing Eames properly and just as Eames is getting lost in the sensation he hears the click of a bottle of lube being opened. Arthur lubes up two fingers and rubs them against Eames’ hole. Just a tease at first, he knows how to hold back until Eames can’t help but move into his hands.

For all that Eames is, himself, a tease, he’s rather impatient under Arthur’s hands. Though, that doesn’t necessarily mean he wants Arthur to speed up, just that Arthur has a knack for giving the most tantalizing touches that leave Eames unable to do anything but ask for more.

Arthur pushes a finger in and it’s not nearly enough, he knows it isn’t. If his mouth weren’t currently full of Eames’ cock, Eames has no doubt he’d be smirking about it. Eames rocks his hips impatiently. “Arthur… more…”

Arthur looks up to make eye contact with Eames, raises an eyebrow and crooks his finger, still just the one, and bobs his head. Eames moans and brings his hands down, one twisting into the sheets at his side and the other tangled in Arthur’s hair. He doesn’t tug, but he does wind his fingers through.

Arthur keeps moving that damned single finger, like he’s proving just how not enough it is. Eames can’t help but squirm, trying to angle Arthur better. It’s not that Arthur doesn’t know he isn’t providing maximum stimulation, it’s that Arthur is withholding on purpose.

“You know…” Eames says, “I almost fingered myself while you were in the shower.”

Arthur pulls off and replaces his mouth with the hand that isn’t currently occupied. “Oh?”

Eames nods. “Wasn’t sure how _ready_ you meant when you told me to be ready.”

“Hm.” Arthur pushes a second finger in and Eames takes it eagerly, more than ready for it.

He fucks Eames with two fingers and strokes him, twisting his wrist and rubbing his thumb over every sensitive spot he knows, then says, “We should do that.”

Worked up as he is, it takes Eames a moment to parse what Arthur’s said and even then he isn’t sure what he’s referencing. “Do what?”

“You get yourself all lubed up and ready and then we go out and you’re wet and open and ready for me and we both know it.” Arthur curls his fingers again and Eames rocks his hips into the sensation. “You’re wet and ready for me and all I have to do to fuck you is pull down your pants, not even all the way. Just enough. I could bend you over a nightclub sink and fuck right in, no prep needed.”

Eames moans, the dirty talk and dual stimulation of Arthur’s fingers fucking into him and Arthur’s hand stroking him nearing overwhelming.

“And you’d take it. Like a slut—” Arthur pauses, then grins down at him, “Like a _slag_. All desperate to take whatever I gave you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Eames pants, fucking up into Arthur’s hand and down onto his fingers, unsure which direction he wants more.

Arthur bends down again, taking the head of Eames’ cock into his mouth and sucking, while maintaining the rhythm of his hand and his fingers and that’s enough to tip Eames over the edge. He comes with a cry and bucks up hard, Arthur’s fingers following to keep up the pressure on his prostate, only stopping when Eames collapses back on the bed, boneless.

Eames tends to get extremely sensitive immediately after orgasm, but enjoys post-coital touch. Arthur moves his hands up to grip Eames’ hips and rubs his thumbs firmly over the ridge of Eames’ hipbones and presses slow soft kisses along Eames’ thighs. Another benefit of sleeping with someone familiar with you, Eames muses, lazily carding his fingers through Arthur’s hair and enjoying being held and the light stimulation of Arthur’s mouth.

He relaxes like that a bit, waiting for his breathing and heart rate to go down. Arthur doesn’t seem to be in a particular hurry to move along, but he knows Arthur’s surely ready to get off too. He tightens his grip in Arthur’s hair, not enough to hurt, just enough to get his attention. “Want to get up here so I can take care of you?”

Arthur stops what he’s doing and looks up at Eames, a sly smile on his face. “You recovered enough?”

“Fuck you,” Eames replies, laughing. He sits up and playfully shoves Arthur down. “Don’t sound so full of yourself.”

“I think I’m more full of you.” Arthur licks his lips.

Eames leans in and kisses him, tasting himself in Arthur’s mouth. “Mm, you may be right.” He gets situated between Arthur’s legs. “Now lie back and enjoy.”

“Not lie back and think of England?” Arthur teases.

“I’m doing this wrong if that’s all you can think of,” Eames says, then takes Arthur’s cock into his mouth with no further preamble.

Arthur moans, extremely responsive after so long with no stimulation. He lets Eames set the pace and Eames takes the opportunity to show off. He bobs his head, taking Arthur deep, pulls up to rub his tongue right against the ridge at the base of the head of Arthur’s cock, where Arthur is most responsive, and he uses his hands to play with Arthur’s balls. He considers throwing a finger or two in the mix, like Arthur did for him, but after Arthur responds to another deep swallow with a bitten off groan, he has a better idea.

He pulls off and says, “Fuck my mouth.” Then takes Arthur in again.

Arthur knows he can take it, they’ve done it before. He knows when Eames says to fuck his mouth he has permission to do exactly that, no teasing testing little thrusts. He can shove it down Eames’ throat if he wants, Eames knows how to hold his gag reflex fully in check when he sets his mind to it. Which he has, he’s ready and angling his head so Arthur’s cock will have an easier time sliding down and not bumping as much against his palate.

Arthur grips Eames’ hair on the back of his head to steady him, then thrusts up hard. Eames keeps his throat lax and takes it.

“Oh _fuck_ ,” Arthur breathes. They’ve done it before, but Arthur always marvels like it’s the first time.

Arthur braces his feet against the bed and holds Eames’ head study, fucking up sharply and gasping. Eames doesn’t think he’ll last long like this, but he tucks one hand up behind Arthur’s balls to help him along, a few of his knuckles pressing against Arthur’s perineum and rubbing.

“Oh fuck,” Arthur says again, with more feeling. He tightens his grip on Eames’ hair and keeps fucking his mouth. Were it biologically possible, Eames knows he’d be hard again in a second due to that display.

As Eames expected, it isn’t long before Arthur’s coming down Eames’ throat and Eames swallows and pulls off. Grinning up at Arthur who’s lying back on the bed with his eyes shut, panting like he just ran a marathon.

Eames leisurely kisses his way up Arthur’s body, not stopping to linger anywhere, but not hurrying to finish either. By the time he’s at eye level with Arthur again, Arthur’s eyes are open. Arthur reaches out and strokes a thumb over Eames’ bottom lip, which Eames takes into his mouth and sucks, flicking his tongue against it like he did Arthur’s cock. He’s gratified to see Arthur’s arousal at the move shine in his eyes, even if there’s nothing to act on.

“Let’s go to town tomorrow,” Eames says, letting Arthur’s thumb fall from his mouth, his voice a little more gravel than usual.

“Ready to get away from the resort?”

Eames nods. “I want to see the actual local nightlife.”

“Alright.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, we’ll go to whatever seedy little backroom card game you’re so desperate to get a seat at.”

“You know me so well,” Eames says, voice light and teasing.

“Yeah,” Arthur replies, sounding a little distant. Thoughtful perhaps.

Eames looks at him in question, there’s a slightly distracted look on Arthur’s face, but it clears in a moment and Arthur focuses on him again. “Want to go get dinner?”

“Sure.”

Arthur nods and gets up, stretching and making his way back to the bathroom. Eames watches him go, already thinking of strategies to ingratiate himself with key locals to get access to exactly the sort of underground betting locale he’d like. Tomorrow will be fun, a challenge he’s looking forward to.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I was doing chapter titles, this one might be “In Which Eames Panics over the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known and Maybe Possibly Falling in L*ve”. As one does.

The angle Eames chooses for their foray into Mexico’s underground gambling scene is different from the one he’s gotten settled into in Mombasa (flamboyant but harmless expat with a checkered enough past to be comfortable with the criminal element, but not someone who’s making any moves—no need for concern, just amusement at his novel status). He isn’t familiar enough with the scene here to set himself up too deeply—he knows he needs to come across as a tourist. Someone with a little taste for the wild side, but a little clueless. Not so naive that he puts himself in anyone’s crosshairs as an easy mark, but someone who everyone knows isn’t aware of the territory and who will be moving on soon. Someone with money to burn who wants a story of thrill to take home.

He also has to take into account that Arthur will be accompanying him. Arthur isn’t suited to be arm candy. Not that he isn’t incredibly attractive, but he’s too competent, too clearly in charge of himself to play that role. Instead, Eames decides the easiest for their purposes is they’re rich, he’s got a taste for risk, and Arthur is his long suffering partner who indulges his taste for adventure as long as it’s only for the night.

He tells Arthur to act a little put-upon and none too interested in the goings on of the establishment. To stick by his side and be a little amused by Eames’ thrill-seeking. It should be an easy enough act.

Arthur finds the instructions amusing and agrees to it. He doesn’t get too dressed up, nor too dressed down. Eames thinks he looks like a gay stockbroker on vacation and Arthur decides that’s their cover. They’re from New York City and before they leave Arthur’s indulging Eames with a night on the town—backroom gambling style. Eames is pleased by Arthur’s embracing of the game and goes along with it, he creates a whole life for them in his head.

“We met through my father,” Eames says, the door to the bathroom open as he looks at himself in the mirror. He’s trying out different ways of styling his hair for this and hasn’t gotten it quite right yet.

“Your father?” Arthur asks from where he’s standing at the other side of the bedroom, deciding between two shirts.

“Mh-hm. He’s a big deal in the industry… brought me along to New York in order to force me into business meetings… follow in his image.”

“This sounds very Robert Fischer.”

“Yes, except I was never going to go along with it. I gave up on impressing my father a long time ago. I don’t fall into line and stuff my feelings deep inside and seek to please. I act out. I fuck the important boys I’m supposed to be in business with.” Eames settles on a style for his hair, it’s relaxed, but still keeps his cowlicks under control.

“So while you’re busy rebelling and fucking your way through the stock exchange what is it you actually do? Or are you a trust fund baby who doesn’t work?”

“Oh, I’m an overly privileged rich boy, certainly. But… I’m an artist,” Eames says, washing the product off his hands and leaving the bathroom.

“An artist?” Arthur’s buttoning up the shirt he ended up picking.

“Painter, I think. Or sculptor…” Eames trails off as he considers. “Well, I dabble in various things. We have one of those high-rise apartments and I’ve got a studio in there, with big windows overlooking Manhattan.”

“Sounds picturesque.”

“Between my inheritance and your high rolling paycheck, we live the high life.”

“And you gave up your partying ways to be with me?”

“You were different, you brought out my desire to settle down.”

“What was so special about me?”

“You know I need my thrills, you indulge me. And you… ground me. You’re very stable, but not suffocating.”

Arthur’s got that considering look on his face again, but he doesn’t say anything. Eames lets it be and gets his own shirt on, he even buttons up most of the buttons.

“So what is it your parents think you do?” Arthur asks after a moment.

“I don’t think it’s any real secret. I mean, my father’s well aware of my tendencies and—”

“I meant you,” Arthur interrupts, “ _You_ you. Your actual parents.”

“Oh,” Eames says. He considers lying for the briefest of moments, but quickly decides he doesn’t particularly mind Arthur knowing the truth of the matter. “I haven’t the slightest.”

“They never asked?”

“I haven’t spoken with them since I left home. I presume they’ve supplied their own tale of woe about their horrid son they never wanted becoming a rebellious poof and running off. Likely they think I’m dead or might as well be.”

Arthur’s watching him and he looks a little regretful. “I’m sorry.”

Eames waves a hand. “It’s fine. It’s not as if they ever gave any indication they’d be any other way. Ancient history.”

“Right.” Arthur has a small frown on his face and opens his mouth, but closes it again without speaking, apparently deciding against whatever he was going to say. He fetches that little notebook of his and jots something down, then puts it back in its place.

Eames watches and almost wants to ask what Arthur was writing. ‘Daddy Issues’ perhaps? A little too cliché, a little too simplistic. A little reductive, a little offensive. A little too Robert Fischer for his taste. Even if he was the one to insist on that angle. Even if, as a voice in the back of his head says—rather snidely in Eames’ opinion, it takes one to know one.

He doesn’t like that particular voice very much.

He lets Arthur’s notation go unmentioned and focuses on his role, on having fun. On letting Arthur take him out and pretending to be his little bit spoiled little bit wild boyfriend. It’s easy, the two of them are completely convincing and Eames has a hell of a time at the table.

They don’t leave richer than they entered (Eames knows better than to win big or cheat when he’s this much of an outsider, that’s just asking for trouble), but they do leave laughing and holding hands.

They leave Mexico for California. He knows California will be sunny too, but Mexico is so bright and sunny and full of warmth that he hates to leave it. Mexico is long days on the beach, is late nights doing nothing of consequence, is getting drunk in the sun and laughing about whatever mundane thing amuses them in the moment.

It’s Arthur in nothing but swim trunks confidently sipping his piña colada. It’s the two of them side by side in the sand. It’s the waves breaking against his back and Arthur close at hand. It’s the indulgence of their little private luxury cabin. It’s joyful and warm and a little unreal for it, like a dream Eames doesn’t want to wake from.

He’s sorry to leave, but they have reservations calling their names. And, not just any reservations. Arthur was able to find someone selling their reservation to The French Laundry rather than rely on the reservation system to get a table, meaning instead of waiting months, they’re due for their dinner in a few days. They had initially meant to go to Las Vegas after Mexico, but in light of the reservations, they push back their Vegas plans and Arthur finds them a nice hotel in Napa Valley.

Eames thinks Arthur fits in here, in Napa Valley. It’s funny because Arthur isn’t exactly a laid back California type, nor is he even a snob really. He’s exacting, sure, but he doesn’t turn up his nose at lower pleasures. Eames knows for a fact the man has a completely unhealthy love of New York City hot dog vendors. No one can claim to be a snob whilst double-fisting two street corner hot dogs, no matter what label suit they’re wearing (Tom Ford, when Eames witnessed Arthur doing this firsthand).

But Arthur enjoys the high life too, they all do. They wouldn’t be criminals of their class if they didn’t.

So Arthur fits in in Napa Valley, along with other classy vacationers here to enjoy a more relaxed version of the high life.

They tour vineyards, which is something Eames is good at. He knows exactly how to talk about the bouquet, the mouthfeel. He can hold his own against any wine snob and entertains himself bullshitting his opinions to rich people who obviously don’t know the first thing about wine. They fall head over heels for his accent and on tour groups the ones he’s caught very obviously watch to see which wines he favors before they buy any bottles.

Swindling people comes easy to him and he plays up his posh accent and delights every time he gets someone to buy something just from his say so. Arthur’s amused too, he can tell. It’s not even a low stakes con, it’s no stakes, but it’s fun.

While they’re there, but before their dinner, Eames locates a vintage shop and makes a special trip to get a new suit just for the occasion. Or, new to him, but vintage suit. He selects one with classic details, one that’s timeless enough to look fashionable, but is still undoubtedly a vintage piece. He finds a tailor near their hotel and pays extra to get it turned around in time for their dinner.

Arthur’s seen him in suits before, but never quite like this. Those were all for Eames at work, he’s never seen Eames dressing up for himself. Though, he must admit it’s more than a little for Arthur’s benefit too.

He puts it on in the bathroom so he can have a grand reveal moment. He shaved and he has a new pocket square. The suit fits perfectly, much tighter to his form than the ones he usually wears on jobs, but not quite as slim tailored as Arthur’s. His body type doesn’t really work for that, but he knows he fills this one out well.

He doesn’t quite throw the bathroom door open, but he does make sure to make a bit of an entrance. He wants to catch Arthur’s eye.

“Oh,” Arthur says, giving Eames a thorough once over. “You look good.” He sounds impressed and perhaps a little turned on.

Eames grins. “Thank you, darling.” He resists the temptation to do a spin, but he is going to keep an eye on Arthur so he can catch him checking out his arse (if he does, that is, but Eames is fairly confident he will).

This doesn’t pay off until they arrive at the restaurant, but Eames catches Arthur looking after they get out of their rental car and he smiles to himself. He’s been returning the favor too, Arthur got dressed up in one of his work suits so the two of them make quite the pair.

The iconic blue door gleams in welcome and Eames can’t quite put words to the elation he feels as they enter and are ushered to their table.

They both opt for the chef’s tasting menu and Eames opts for every upgrade possible. Arthur sticks to the base menu and gives Eames a small bite of everything he gets. Eames offers the same to Arthur, but he turns every offering down with a smile. Up until they reach the dish where Eames upgraded for an incredible cut of beef rather than the standard lamb, that Arthur does have a small taste of.

The food is incredible, as is the wine. They pair a new wine with many of the courses and by the time they’ve finished the eighth dish, the last before dessert, Eames can tell it’s gone to his head a bit. He isn’t drunk, but he’s certainly not sober. He’s grinning and couldn’t stop even if he wanted to. Which, he doesn’t. He’s full of incredible food and excellent wine and he’s staring at Arthur. Arthur who looks good enough to eat and is watching him with an expression so fond Eames feels the warmth of it through him stronger than any wine he’s imbibed.

They finish off their desserts and Eames angles for a kitchen tour, all smiles and charm. It isn’t hard, he knows that’s something they offer patrons who ask so it’s not like he’s getting away with anything. The waiter is happy to take them and as they stand and make their way back, it just feels natural to slip his hand into Arthur’s. Arthur interlocks their fingers and follows along.

He’s buoyed with an almost giddy feeling as they thank the chefs and get a quick look around. He knows this is more interesting to him than it is to Arthur and he squeezes Arthur’s hand in thanks for indulging him. After the tour they’re offered a post-meal stop in the courtyard where a selection of rare liquors and pre-embargo Cuban cigars are on offer. Eames glances at Arthur to gauge his interest and it only takes one look of his pleading expression for Arthur to acquiesce with a smile.

Eames helps himself to both a cigar and a top shelf scotch, while Arthur partakes of a fine cognac. 

It takes more restraint than it normally would for Eames to keep his hands to himself as Arthur drives them back to their hotel, but he doesn’t particularly fancy ending up in a wreck just because he wanted to cop a feel so he manages. He holds out until the doors of the elevator close on them, mercifully leaving them as the only passengers, and then he steps right into Arthur’s space.

Arthur looks faintly amused and lets Eames crowd him up against the wall of the elevator, leaning his weight back so Eames can press up against him. Eames works Arthur’s tie loose and starts kissing and nibbling at his neck. Arthur allows this, but does push away his hands when Eames starts to get a little more forward with his groping.

“What’s all this for?”

Eames bites a little harder at the juncture where Arthur’s neck meets his shoulder, not hard enough to even sting, but enough for Arthur to feel his teeth. “What, a man can’t show appreciation for his fellow now?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You look absolutely _delectable_ , who am I to neglect showing proper appreciation for it?”

“You’re saying it’s just the suit?”

Eames hums and pulls back a little, keeping their bodies flush, but giving himself enough space that he can look at Arthur. “It’s to reward you.”

“You’re acting like I had to put up with something,” Arthur laughs. “I had a good time too.”

“I’m glad. Mmm…” Eames hums again, “Not reward, then. Thank. To _thank_ you.”

The elevator dings and the doors slide open. Arthur pushes past Eames, but grabs him by the tie and pulls him along down the hall. Eames knows he’s got an utterly ridiculous grin on his face as he eagerly follows Arthur’s lead.

The moment they’re in their room Eames crowds Arthur up against a wall again and shushes him before he can speak. “Shhh, let me do the work.”

“That would be a change of pace, huh?”

“ _Shh_.” Eames presses a finger over Arthur’s lips. “No more snarking, though you know I adore our witty banter.”

Arthur stays silent this time and allows Eames to strip him, which he does with reverence. Each layer slowly and carefully peeled off and laid aside. As every new inch of Arthur’s skin is revealed Eames stops to kiss it, like Arthur’s a gift he’s unwrapping and must show proper appreciation for.

He manages to get himself stripped down as well, but with much more haste than he showed for Arthur. He pushes Arthur back on the bed and renews his task of kissing over his body. He pays particular attention to Arthur’s hip bones, but neglects to touch his cock. Then he kisses up to Arthur’s nipples and spends some time sucking and licking at them until they’re hard and pink. By the time he reaches Arthur’s neck, which he intends to grace with gentle bites, he has Arthur worked up and squirming under him.

“C’mon,” Arthur says, shifting and trying to get at an angle so he can rut up against Eames. 

Eames tuts at him and moves his hips back. “I told you, let me do the work.”

“You aren’t _doing_ the work.”

“All this rush to the finish line,” Eames says with mock disappointment, “Whatever happened to enjoying the journey?”

“You’re such a fucking cocktease.”

Eames hums and trails the back of two fingers down along the length of Arthur’s straining cock, delighting in the way Arthur inhales and thrusts up, hoping for more. Then he pulls away entirely and sits up.

Arthur lets out a whine he’d surely deny making if asked and frowns. “Get back here.”

“I thought you were eager for me to do ‘the work’,” Eames says, reaching out for lube on the nightstand.

“Not all the way over here.”

“Hm, I think I like it over here.” Eames stays out of Arthur’s reach, opens the bottle of lube and coats his fingers, then gets settled on his knees and reaches behind himself.

“Let me—”

“No, no,” Eames cuts him off, “I’m doing the work.” He would usually make quicker work of prepping himself than Arthur tends to, but he’s in the mood for teasing. He knows Arthur can’t actually see his fingers from this angle so instead of focusing on making a show of fucking them in and out of himself, he puts more effort into his expression. He bites his lip and rocks his hips back against his hand, playing up his gasping and moaning for Arthur’s benefit.

Arthur lies there, though he does get up on his elbows to be able to watch better. He’s flushed and Eames can see his cock twitch in anticipation. “How does it feel?”

“Good… full. Not enough.”

“I can help you with that,” Arthur says, his impatience getting the better of him as he reaches down to stroke himself.

Eames considers reprimanding him, but instead raises an eyebrow and continues to finger himself. “Looks like you’re helping yourself.”

“For you.”

“I _ah_ ,” he plays up a little gasp and relishes at how Arthur’s hand grips himself tighter in response, “I can finish myself off just fine if you’re so desperate.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Arthur says, a little petulantly for a man about to get his dick ridden, but Eames will acknowledge he has been a tease.

“You want to help, get a condom on.”

Arthur obeys this command quickly, then settles back on the bed, watching Eames.

Eames considers drawing it out a bit more, continuing the tease, but he’s more than eager to move on as well, so he pulls his fingers out and moves up the bed to straddle Arthur.

He lines up and sinks down slowly, both because it’s hard to take a cock too fast, but also for Arthur’s benefit. He wants Arthur to feel every inch sink in until he’s settled on his lap. Once he is he stays there, rolling his hips slowly as he adjusts, but not moving up yet. He keeps Arthur’s full length inside and clenches as he shifts back and forth slowly. Arthur gasps and brings his hands down to grab hold of Eames’ hips, but doesn’t try to urge him to move.

He waits until he feels the tension in Arthur’s body reaching the breaking point, then he starts to ride him in earnest. Arthur arches under him as he moves and Eames sets one hand down to brace against Arthur’s chest as he picks up speed. Arthur lets him control the pace, though he does start to thrust in tandem.

Eames is focused a bit more on getting Arthur off than himself, not that he’s neglecting his own pleasure, but he wants to focus on Arthur. He’s working at a good angle for himself, but aiming his timing at what he knows Arthur likes, speeding up as Arthur gets noisier.

“Oh fuck,” Arthur gasps, arching underneath him.

“Good enough work for you?” Eames can’t help but tease, his thighs starting to burn slightly from the rigorous workout he’s giving them, but he doesn’t falter. He’s a little too focused on what he’s doing though, because he misses the telltale tensing of Arthur’s muscles as Arthur pulls his feet up to brace against the bed and moments later slams up with a hard thrust that almost dislodges Eames if it weren’t for his own good balance and Arthur’s hands now tight on his hips.

“Full enough for you?” Arthur tosses back, satisfied to let Eames take the reins again now that he’s had his snappy little retort.

“Ah,” Eames gasps out, “Always, darling.” He sits up more and reaches down to where Arthur’s still holding his hips. He circles Arthur’s wrists with his hands and pulls them up, pinning them against the bed on either side of Arthur’s head. The new angle is incredible, though he’s bracing his weight against the bed now, which leaves his face hovering just above Arthur’s.

The eye contact is intense like this, but Eames is wary of moving too much given how good the angle is so he doesn’t move back. He does duck low enough to kiss Arthur a few times, but Arthur’s quickly losing the coordination to move his mouth and hips efficiently at the same time so Eames leans back up slightly and watches him.

“God, you feel good inside me,” Eames says, “Fucking… _perfect_ , darling. Filling me up perfectly.”

Arthur’s moaning and there’s a flush across his face and Eames can see it in his eyes, feel it in Arthur’s hands clenching beneath his own where he still has them pinned, he’s close.

“Come on,” Eames urges, “Come on, come for me.”

Arthur comes with a harsh buck and a jerk of his arms as he instinctively tries to free himself from Eames’ hold to grab at Eames and hold him close.

Eames settles in his lap, but stays on, releasing Arthur’s hands and sitting up to watch Arthur pant and come back to himself. He’s sweaty and flushed and it takes a few moments for him to open his eyes again. He looks blissfully fucked out and Eames can’t help but circle his hips, pulling a sharp little whine from Arthur.

Eames tries to still himself. “Too much?”

Arthur considers, stroking his hands over Eames’ thighs idly. “How close are you?”

“Very.” Eames is rocking his hips minutely, unable to stay still now, but he’s doing his best to not overstimulate Arthur.

“Hop up,” Arthur says, patting Eames’ thigh in an upward motion, encouraging him to get off.

Eames is loathe to lose the hot hard _fullness_ of Arthur inside him, but he knows Arthur will be going soft now anyway so staying on isn’t going to stay good for long. He kneels over Arthur, legs still straddling him as he considers how he wants to position himself now.

“If you weren’t such a mess of lube I’d tell you to sit on my face,” Arthur says, reaching a hand down and curling his fingers against Eames’ hole in a horrible-delicious tease.

Eames’ first reply to that is a strangled moan and a rock of his hips.

Arthur laughs and thrusts his fingers in.

“Don’t mock me,” Eames says, gathering the last of his intelligible brain cells to force words together.

“Poor baby,” Arthur coos, settling right to fucking Eames with his fingers, no tease about it. He brings his other hand up to stroke Eames’ cock in perfect counterbalance and Eames has to reach over him to grab the headboard to steady himself as he moves back and forth on Arthur’s hands.

“You gonna come on my face?” Arthur asks, wickedly, like that’s even a question at all now that it’s been offered.

“Yeah,” Eames breathes out, rocking his hips as Arthur plays him perfectly. The thrust of his fingers, the twist of his wrist, the pressure and the movement and his perfect gorgeous handsome face right there beneath Eames, just waiting. He comes with a groan and Arthur angles his cock so his cum does indeed land across his face. Eames stares down at him in something like wonder and he thinks the sight is almost enough to make him come again.

Arthur grins up at him like he’s won something and Eames thinks maybe he has. They both have.

He tucks himself against Arthur’s side, vaguely aware of Arthur doing some amount of clean up, but mostly he just lets himself enter that warm sweet dozing state you only get after a good meal, good drink, or good orgasm (or, in his case, all three). It’s a luxury that he can be so relaxed, it’s a luxury that he was taken out and wined and dined and fucked and all three happened according to his tastes and desires. It’s a luxury that Arthur, perfect, handsome, precise, diligent _Arthur_ is the one next to him providing it all and allowing Eames to shove at him until he’s manhandled them into a cuddle that Eames feels satisfied with.

It’s a luxury and Eames, for all his love of gaudy kitsch and dirty grimy back alley deals, has an appreciation for the finer things in life. And of the things, he thinks Arthur may just be one of the finest.

Eames wakes first in the morning. The light is filtered through the curtains, not too bright, but enough that he can tell the sun has well and truly risen. The bed is soft and warm and Arthur’s sound asleep beside him.

He slips out of bed quietly, doing his best not to wake Arthur. He thinks he might shower, maybe he can run out and grab breakfast, surprise Arthur with breakfast in bed. He wants to have a lazy morning in with him. He wants to kiss every inch of Arthur’s sleep warm skin until he wakes. He wants to wake up like this morning after morning.

He wants, he wants.

He wants too much. 

He wants things that were never supposed to be. These thoughts, these desires. As soon as they register in his mind he’s overwhelmed. Now he wants to run, to escape. It was never supposed to be this serious. It isn’t serious. He enjoys Arthur’s company, he likes working with him, likes spending time with him, the sex is good. But not more.

The holiday was for fun, even Arthur’s little pet project of helping with the identity thing is casual. It was never going to go anywhere, no matter how many notes Arthur took. But now, Eames is getting too settled into their routine. He’s dangerously close to compromised, to no longer acting in accordance to the rules set out by his creation of Eames.

Eames would never have gotten this attached. Eames would never have lost sight of keeping an emotional distance. Eames would never _want_ the way he just woke up wanting.

He gets into the shower and starts it with cold water. It’s highly unpleasant, but he thinks he needs the shock. A jolt to wake him up, not a leisurely continuation of this fantasy he’s apparently started living in. It works, he feels that horrible sort of awake you only get when drenched in freezing water. He switches to hot to wash himself and gets to planning.

They need to shake things up, stop with the things they’ve been doing. They’ve gotten complacent and they’re acting like… well, like a couple.

They’re supposed to spend a few more days in Napa Valley before moving on to Las Vegas, but Eames thinks they should leave sooner rather than later. Vegas might just be what they need to return to normal.

Casinos and the lurid flash of the Strip is precisely the type of environment Eames thrives in. Eames, as he usually is. Not this softer Eames that Arthur’s drawn out.

Eames the slick smooth conman. Eames the good time gambler always ready with a line and gone before the sun rises.

When Arthur gets up Eames says he’s dying to get to Las Vegas sooner rather than later. Arthur takes it just fine, joking about Eames needing to gamble and changing their reservations, easy as that. Eames laughs and kisses him and makes sure not to step an inch out of place and rouse any suspicion. He thinks he manages it perfectly because Arthur doesn’t behave any differently, just smiles and writes more notes in that damned moleskine of his.

Las Vegas is all shimmer and sheen, glitz and glamour. Eames can’t help but grin when they arrive at the Strip. The city pulsing with life all around them, full of people and neon lights and the cacophony of casinos at work.

Arthur books them a luxury suite at the NoMad. It’s exactly where Eames would have pegged Arthur picking, rather than the main Park MGM or the Venetian. The NoMad is a little more refined, more old world class and dark woods rather than flashy neons. It’s a pocket of peaceful luxury in the heart of the Strip with easy access to everything you’d want from a Vegas trip.

It gives Arthur access to plenty of non-gambling activities up above the loud masses of people along the street. There’s restaurants and a quieter, more private pool, and swanky little spots like an all-gin bar where Arthur can indulge without getting caught up in the swirling cacophony below.

Eames is ready to throw himself into that maelstrom. He wants the lights and the noise and the dizzying array of sensory overload. He wants to parade himself up and down the Strip and get his hands on everything he can.

He loves the Strip, but here, unlike Mexico, he has connections. If he wanted he could call in and see what was happening, get access to the backroom tables. Immerse himself in a familiar scene of high stakes and dirty money. It’s tempting, it calls him, but he resists, at least for now.

For now he focuses on the legal gambling right under his fingertips. The NoMad is perched atop the Park MGM so he merely has to go downstairs to access a casino. Not to mention the dozens of others along the Strip. He can go somewhere refined, like the Park MGM’s private high limit room, with its dark woods and Tiffany glass ceiling. Or he can go flashier, more cliché, and head to the Venetian. Maybe even take it gaudy old school and settle in at the Flamingo. Choices abound and he feels a reckless sort of delight throwing himself into it.

It’s also the first time since starting their holiday that he and Arthur have spent so much time apart. Arthur doesn’t have interest in spending hours at the tables so he goes to occupy himself with the numerous other entertainment offerings and leaves Eames to gamble to his heart’s content.

At first, it’s a delight. He stays out on the town and lives it up as he pleases and every night he returns to their shared room and finds Arthur there waiting for him. It’s the best of both worlds, the freedom to remember who he is, who Eames is, but still having Arthur there, still being able to enjoy everything he’s had since he and Arthur started this holiday.

It’s bright and shiny and it’s everything he wants served up on a platter for him to help himself to. He’s never been good at moderation, at keeping his hands to himself. He always wants to grab and take and touch and steal all the beautiful little things that catch his eye and hoard them away.

It doesn’t take long before it starts to turn, but not even in any overt way. Arthur doesn’t say anything, doesn’t stop him from going out, but there’s something there in Arthur’s eyes as Eames returns to their room later and later each night until it can no longer be classified as ‘late’, rather, it’s early.

There’s no confrontation, no attempt to impose rules or order. It’s just this look in Arthur’s eye when Eames rolls in after a long night. It starts to dig at Eames like an itch and so he stays out even later, waiting for the tension to build to something. He doesn’t know where it’s going, but he can’t stand the limbo. He needs to push and push because he wants the snap, you don’t know where you stand until you hit the snap.

Arthur starts to go to sleep sometimes, before Eames has even come back to their room. It almost feels like a dismissal, but surely it’s more of a measure of trust. That Arthur _trusts_ him to sleep there, allows him to enter and climb into bed while Arthur’s so open and vulnerable. He comforts himself with that thought and always tries his best to not wake him when he returns.

And he does always return, even if it’s not until what is technically the next day, he always comes back. He doesn’t conduct himself as he has in past Vegas trips where he’d wind up in various hotel rooms with various people in all states of inebriation. He always goes back to Arthur, no matter how stiff he now looks as he scribbles away in his fucking notebook.

Eames is in the main Park MGM casino and knows he’s caught the eye of a few people. He’s had enough of playing solo for the evening and has been making himself available, waiting to see who might approach. He surveys his options, those he knows he’s already intrigued, and he considers who he should follow up on. 

There’s a flatteringly young woman toying with her drink and trying to make eye contact with him. It only takes a moment to note the slight desperation of her demeanor and the fake luxury of her clothes and write her off. She’s trying to work an angle and would probably try to pick his pocket if he didn’t play along as the high roller she obviously wants. He’d almost like to give her the chance to try, but he’s not sure he’s in the mood for the fuss.

There’s an older woman who looks more promising and a few gentlemen of various standing. One man in particular catches his eye, he’s not old and unattractive enough to be desperate to buy affection, but he’s certainly scoping out the room for a companion. And, if the way his eyes trail after the male staff indicate anything, he’d like a younger man at his side.

Eames is about to sidle up and make his approach, when he spots the young lady finally pluck up her courage and approach him. He wasn’t expecting her to make the first move and it’s got him curious, so he sits back and waits for her to play her opening line.

She’s young and pretty, all dolled up and even if Eames can tell everything she’s wearing is off-brand, it’s not offensively so. Certainly, the less discerning wouldn’t be able to clock it within a few moments like he did. She approaches with a smile and settles beside him at an angle to show off her cleavage. He appreciates how effortless she makes it look, it isn’t a hamfisted shoving of her breasts in his face. It takes work to play a role without going over the line of audacious and he has great admiration for those who manage it.

“Hello,” she says, which is incredibly simple for an opening line, but it does strategically allow her to see how he decides to set the tone for their interaction.

He opts to play up his accent and smiles at her. “Hello, pet. What brings you my way?”

She gives him a playful little pout. “You looked lonely.”

“Did I?”

She nods and leans further into his space. He allows it and looks her over, considering.

“Well then, do me the honor of accompanying me?” He holds out his arm, offering her his elbow and she winds her arm through his, all smiles and batted lashes.

They make their rounds at some of the tables and her confidence that she has him pegged increases as he continues to win and let her press up against his side. She’s charming and witty enough for a little banter, though lacking some of the edge Eames like in a verbal sparring partner. It’s alright though, he’s having enough fun as it is. Part of the thrill for him is knowing he’s playing her better than she thinks she’s playing him.

Her confidence and flirting continue to build until she puts her hand on his upper thigh, far higher than propriety truly allows and gives it a little squeeze. “Want to get out of here?”

He laughs and leans back in his seat a little. “Ah, my lady luck, don’t overplay your hand. Tired of the game already?”

She falters for a moment, though she’s talented enough that she wipes it away and goes right back to all smiles. If he truly was the mark she thinks he is he might not have even noticed.

“I can think of a different game we might play…”

He laughs, not at her really, just in good humour. She seems to realize that and smiles back, confidence bolstered again. He sets his hand down on her thigh as well, her skin smooth and soft beneath his palm. He’s about to lean in and make his next move in their little game, when he spots Arthur. It’s like a splash of cold water shocking him out of the moment.

Arthur shouldn’t be here, he thinks. Arthur isn’t part of this game. The role he’s playing right now isn’t compatible with Arthur, is it? He sees Arthur’s eyes drag over the two of them, this pretty girl practically in Eames’ lap and his hand near the edge of her skirt. Something happens in his expression, something Eames doesn’t quite know how to describe, then he turns on his heel and marches out of the casino in the direction of the elevators.

Eames feels a cool sort of dread in his stomach, but from a distance. Like he’s a little detached from his body and the chimes and hubbub of the casino melt into white noise for a moment before the girl’s hand moves and draws him back into the moment like he’s following a lead.

He does the first thing he can think of and pinches her thigh. Not hard, not to hurt her, just to get her attention, get her to stop with her own hand.

“Hush, love, don’t cause a scene,” he says, speaking low.

She’s frozen in place now, a little stiff. He leans in, looking for all intents and purposes like a lover whispering in her ear. “I admire your dedication, pet, but you’ve picked up a conman. Now get your hand out of my pocket and consider buying yourself something name brand after your next big score. You’re good, but you need to refine your acting a touch and get better at sorting out when someone _else_ is acting.” He sits up and she looks dazed, pulling her hand back from where she’d been trying to unobtrusively slip it in to pickpocket him. He’s a little proud of her for that and pleased he’d pegged that impulse within her.

He grabs her hand gently and brings it up to his lips, giving her a kiss on the back of it and a wink. “A pleasure, love. Have a good night.”

He stands up and leaves her behind without a second glance, following Arthur’s path to the elevators and getting on, keying in the number to their floor.

He miscalculated, he realizes now he didn’t mean to actually piss Arthur off. He’d been so focused on making sure to be truer to Eames that he’d lost sight of maintaining his standing with Arthur. He’d lost sight that that was important to him. He’d been chasing the snap and now that he had it, he wasn’t sure he’d ever really wanted it.

He isn’t quite sure what he’ll find waiting for him in their room, he isn’t sure how far he’s pushed Arthur, really.

He enters their room and finds Arthur there. He doesn’t look that out of sorts, but there is a line of tension in his shoulders.

“You looked friendly,” Arthur says, obviously going for unbothered, but his voice has an edge of a bite to it.

“Jealous?” Eames purrs. “You know there’s no one I’d rather be friendly with…” He reaches out and runs his hand down Arthur’s chest. Maybe he should drop to his knees and distract Arthur that way, the symbolism of kneeling functioning as apology as he draws Arthur into his mouth and takes him until Arthur forgets what he was miffed about in the first place.

“You use sex as a distraction, did you know that?”

Eames stops short, his tentative plans frozen as Arthur wrenches him off his tracks.

“You do. To distract others and yourself. Any time something gets too close or you have something on your mind and don’t want to talk about it you use sex.”

“If you don’t want to fuck, you can just say that,” Eames says, cold and clipped. He feels attacked and he’s not exactly sure why. But it’s enough to push the idea of an apology out of his mind.

Arthur’s frowning, studying him. “I can’t even tell if you know you do it or not.”

Eames sniffs. “If my services aren’t appreciated I can go elsewhere, I know there are plenty of people who’d be more than happy to—”

“Your _services?_ ” Arthur interrupts, “Are you my escort now?”

“Would you like that? It’s not as if you’ve been treating me too much differently from a kept boy, have you?”

Arthur makes a frustrated noise. “Do the sound of slot machines activate something inside you that means it’s time to be a complete fucking jackass?”

“What? Have I offended your delicate sensibilities in some way? You brought me here, you knew what I wanted.”

“I knew you wanted to gamble and live it up obnoxious Vegas style! Not… not act as if… act like—“

“Act like what?”

“This! Whatever _this_ is that you’ve been doing since we got here. It’s like you decided to go out of your way to be an asshole.”

“And this is out of character?” Eames asks, stressing the word ‘character’ to make a point.

“I—“

“Tell me,” Eames cuts Arthur off before he can really respond, “Who is it you want me to be?”

Arthur pauses then. There’s no easy answer to that question and Eames intended it that way. He wants to catch Arthur off his guard and force the issue, much like Arthur did to him that first night.

“I told you I act,” Eames says, “You made sure to find that out first.”

“Even actors stop acting!” Arthur snaps.

“Well, there’s your first mistake! I’m not a fucking actor, I’m a conman and you knew that!”

Arthur’s eyes narrow. “I know you.”

“No,” Eames says with a bitter smile, “You don’t. There’s no _me_ to know. You know Eames, and honestly it seems you barely know him at all anyway!”

“So, what? You’re the international man of mystery and I’m the patsy you pulled a con on this time?”

Eames half wants to say yes, that’s exactly what this is, but at the same time the idea turns his stomach. Arthur as a mark. It sits wrong under his skin. He doesn’t want to think about it.

“No,” Eames says, with a finality of tone.

“No?”

“No, you don’t get to throw this back at me, sweetheart. You knew exactly what you were signing up for.”

Arthur’s jaw clenches and his nostrils flare at the pet name. It isn’t one Eames has ever used for Arthur before and he knows he wielded it like a weapon, an insult. He meant it to be.

He’s working himself up into a proper strop now. Who is Arthur to come in and demand to _know_ Eames? To poke and prod and catalogue and yell when he finds Eames wanting. To expect Eames to fall into line for some role Eames never claimed, to get jealous and pissy that Eames behaves in a way Arthur’s seen him do a hundred times before. Egotistical and judgmental and utterly ludicrous.

“You know,” He says with a harshly conversational tone, all politeness over steel, “If someone had to describe you I’m certain one of the first words they would use would be ‘fastidious’, but that implies a certain level of competence. And sure, you give off that _impression_ , but impressions don’t mean much if you can’t follow through. It’s why you wear those suits—a little boy dressing up like daddy. But just look at the Fischer job—“

Arthur cuts him off, “We pulled off _inception_ , what the fuck is incompetent about that?”

“Yes. _We_ did. Not you. You missed Fischer’s militarization. You let Cobb run wild to the point that _Ariadne_ had to pick up your slack to solve that little issue. There’s nothing you do that can’t be accomplished by a research assistant with a criminal bankroll.”

“Research assistant?” Arthur repeats, angry and incredulous. “Everything I’ve done for you and you’re telling me I’m just a fucking incompetent _research assistant?_ ”

“Everything you’ve done? What, the holiday?” Eames laughs coldly. “I can show myself a good time, I don’t need you for that.”

“The—my help with your identity!”

“Help, was it? I didn’t ask you for it! When did I say ‘oh please, inundate me with your neurotic little lists, I’m just dying to be psychoanalyzed by the man I’m fucking’?”

Arthur’s jaw clenches and he grits out, “You’re such an asshole.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re a sanctimonious bitch.” Eames says this with deceptive lightness, like it, and Arthur too, are beneath him. “Maybe you should go back to California and shack up with Cobb if you want to ride someone’s dick this hard.”

Arthur makes an abortive noise, the choked off start of a word that he decides against and cuts off. He looks equal parts furious and taken aback, but he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t do anything but stand there, nearly vibrating in anger, watching Eames and Eames can’t stand it, he needs a reaction.

“Oh, come on!” He yells, trying to goad Arthur into a response, he needs a response. “Let me fucking have it!”

“You’re a fucking child,” Arthur snaps, “An overgrown fucking child having an endless tantrum. You’re selfish and spoiled and you don’t care about anyone else! You don’t know how to be a person and it shows because you don’t know how to treat people—not really. You only know how to trick and use people. It’s no wonder your parents didn’t want you, but guess what? It’s time to get over it and be a goddamn grownup like the rest of us. This endless Peter Pan spoiled brat shit isn’t cute.”

It lands like an implosion, like all the air got sucked out of the room inward. Eames would almost say he could hear the rumble as it happened, but that’s probably just the blood rushing in his ears. He knows Arthur stuck the knife in and twisted it, and he knows that he outright asked him to, but he doesn’t have the presence of mind to unpack every sharp little hurt inflicted. He’s trying to think of his response, what to hurl at Arthur next, but his mind isn’t supplying ammunition fast enough.

“I need some fucking air,” Arthur says, turning on his heel and marching out the door to their room. Eames suspects he’d have liked to slam it behind him, but was foiled by the luxury hotel hinges controlling the door’s shutting to a gentler speed.

Needing some air isn’t exactly a death knell declaration, nor is it an ultimatum, but Eames finds himself reacting just the same. He’s got his things packed in just a few moments, ever quick and efficient when he really needs to be. Arthur’s left all his belongings in the room so Eames can’t say one way or the other if Arthur intends to stay, or to come back and collect them to leave, but regardless Eames plans to be long gone by the time Arthur makes that decision.

Whether he leaves or Arthur does, the parting of ways is inevitable. It’s clear now Eames has made a series of grave errors and the entire holiday was a fanciful mistake from the start. He grabs his suitcase and leaves the hotel, heading straight for the Vegas airport. He plans to get himself on the first flight out that has an open seat. It doesn’t matter where he goes, just that he gets out before Arthur tracks him down. From there he’ll weave a trail of convenient flights until he can get himself back somewhere he’s a little steadier on his feet.

The glittering neons of the Strip seem to mock him as he watches them recede through the window of his taxi.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who commented!
> 
> Unforeseen consequence of global pandemic: I’m home instead of at work and thus, more time to write, so, earlier than anticipated update.
> 
> Warnings for drug use/abuse (depicted rather than just referenced), further on past child abuse/neglect, and also just general bad coping mechanisms. There’s also some Eames/OMC, but that’s one of those aforementioned bad coping mechanisms that won’t last beyond this.

Eames initially heads back to Mombasa, he thinks familiar territory might be the most helpful. Somewhere Eames knows well, somewhere he’s only ever been Eames.

It’s a hell of a journey, constant flights and layovers. He could have had an easier time of it were it a properly planned route, but instead he’s just snagging each new flight as he arrives. It’s a long and convoluted path that takes a few days to complete and by the time he arrives in Kenya he’s jetlagged as all hell.

He could’ve done it differently, but he wanted to leave quickly and leave a confusing trail behind him. Not that he thinks Arthur is going to track him down, indeed if Arthur wanted to find him it really wouldn’t be too difficult. Mombasa isn’t exactly a surprise locale for Eames to settle in. But the subterfuge of complex travel paths was both instinctual and somewhat comforting.

His little flat he keeps on retainer in Mombasa is quiet and empty and a touch dusty. But it’s secure and it’s his. There’s a bed and his favourite tea and every single item in the place is distinctly Eames’. If there’s anywhere for him to ground Eames, it’s here.

It’s easy to slip back into routine. He greets his contacts in the city, goes about his business. Catches up on sleep and hears all the new gossip. He makes his rounds at the casinos and does some light investigating on the new faces that have cropped up since he was last in town.

It’s easy, and yet it’s not exactly comfortable. He came to settle, but he feels foundationally unsettled. He can’t seem to ease into the role as usual. His acting doesn’t suffer for it, it’s an internal thing. Felt by him, but invisible to others. Like a suit that’s tailored ever so slightly wrong. It almost works, but there’s this nagging tug where the seams just won’t lie flat.

He’s restless and dissatisfied and none of his return to form feels right.

Another job isn’t the answer, not until he gets his head on right, but he wonders if perhaps a little dreaming wouldn’t be out of order. Give him a chance to settle up with his own subconscious in a very real way. It’s not his usual way of handling things, but he’s willing to give it a shot, just to see.

Besides, he’s got a source here. A trustworthy one, in his estimation.

It might seem a bit odd to count Yusuf as trustworthy after the shit he pulled on the Fischer job, but that score was already settled. Eames knows it was Cobb’s call and Yusuf had only done it for the money, not for a vendetta. It was strangely comforting to Eames at the time, knowing Yusuf could be bought. But only for an exorbitant price. It made him predictable in a way Eames liked. And besides, what he’d done was at least not properly _turning_ on them, and he’d experienced risk to himself as well.

But since then, Yusuf had found his way into their little network, just as Ariadne had. He still isn’t big on fieldwork, it’s a lot of fuss and risk when he already has a neat little operation set up for himself. It took a huge payday like inception to catch his interest, and jobs of that caliber are few and far between, or a job with a particularly interesting hook regarding chemistry and experimentation.

Yusuf is reliably self-serving, yet also interested in the science and theory of dreamshare. It makes him an interesting and ground breaking chemist, as well as a known quantity in terms of people Eames knows the measure of. Overall, he likes the man well enough. Certainly, far better than some others in the business.

Yusuf’s little dream den is just as stuffy and dim as ever, but it’s not as though his clients come for the ambiance. Eames enters and asks after Yusuf. He trusts the other man well enough, but he isn’t about to let himself get blindly taken under with all the rest of the customers in the main dreaming room.

Yusuf is summoned and comes shuffling out in his oversized cardigan, all smiles and greetings. “What brings you here? A job?”

“No, I want to dream.”

Yusuf pauses, surprised. “Recreationally?”

Eames hums in affirmation.

“And you can’t do that on your own?”

“Not without somnacin. Or one of your compounds.”

Yusuf nods. “That’ll be five million shillings, my friend.”

Eames pauses. “Five _million?_ ” He asks incredulously.

“Have you forgotten your exchange rates? This is Kenyan shillings. That’s barely a drop in the bucket of what you’re worth.”

“I know what it is and it’s an insult to me and an affront to my status as your _friend_ , you avaricious miser. I thought _friends_ got discounts.”

Yusuf laughs. “It was worth a shot to see if you’d pay up.” He waves his hand. “Come, I’ve been working on some new compounds.” He leads the way back to his private office, away from the dream room where all those desperate people pay to stay locked in their own minds.

“Five _million_ shillings,” Eames mutters, following him. “The fucking nerve.”

“So what is it you’re after?” Yusuf asks, settling in at his desk, which is covered in its usual mess of notes and detritus of a distracted mind. “Recreational dreaming comes in all sorts of flavours.”

“Nothing fancy. Or experimental, before you go off trying to test something on me. I just want fifteen minutes of standard dreamtime.”

“So you have something you need three hours to do? Recreationally.”

“Isn’t part of the point of this whole thing that you don’t ask what it is your clients seek?”

Yusuf puts his hands up placatingly and shrugs, a small but smarmy grin on his face. “Can’t blame me for trying to find out what would bring you into my humble business for your own pleasure.”

Eames clicks his tongue. “A passing fancy that I assumed wouldn’t be this much of a headache to accomplish.”

“And you’re sure I can’t give you anything other than standard?

“I’m not in the mood for something untested.” He very carefully switches his phrasing and waits for Yusuf to take the bait.

Yusuf lights up. “What about something experimental, but not untested? I’ve been perfecting my formula for the compound we tested last job we worked together.”

It’s precisely what Eames was angling for. That compound is exactly what brought him to Yusuf, along with the fact that he likes the man. He just can’t let him know this is what he’s after. He hums and frowns a little, looking like he’s begrudgingly considering it. “When you say ‘perfecting’...?”

Yusuf looks like a man who’s teetering on the edge of winning, who’s all but got his hands on the prize. “Absolutely minimal risk. You already tried an early stage batch, nothing’s been altered that should cause a negative reaction if you didn’t have one the first time.”

Eames sits and stares at Yusuf before he finally nods. “Alright, but don’t expect me to pay up to be your test subject. And I’ll go under alone, thank you.”

“The results—“

“I’ll report back to you, but remember I came into this just wanting to buy a little somnacin, nothing more.”

“Oh, of course.” Yusuf nearly trips over himself to keep Eames on the line. He is so perfectly, comfortingly predictable.

“Fine then. I agree to take that compound and tell you how it goes, but nothing else.”

Yusuf nods. “I can set you up here in the office if you’d like.”

Less than ideal, doing it here with Yusuf to witness. Eames would prefer privacy, but he can’t tip Yusuf off that this is anything other than casual. Besides, if he pushes for his way too much, he risks Yusuf giving up and handing over a vial of standard somnacin compound, which defeats the very point. At least Yusuf is granting him use of the office, rather than trying to put him down with the masses.

“That worried I’ll run off without reporting the results to you?” Eames asks in amusement, already rolling up his sleeve.

“You, my friend, are nothing if not a man good at running.”

Yusuf’s more right about that than he even knows. Eames gets comfortable in his chair and waits for Yusuf to set up the PASIV. He hooks himself up and watches.

“Fifteen minutes and then I’ll give you the kick?” Yusuf asks, measuring out the right amount of the compound and loading it in.

“Yes, thank you.”

Eames goes under and while he intends to come to in a decently neutral dreamscape, the one he finds himself in can be described as anything but. He’s on the grounds of his family’s country estate, though thankfully no one seems to be around.

He takes a deep breath to settle himself. He could try to alter the dream if he wanted, put himself somewhere else. That’s the nice thing about dreams, but it would defeat the purpose of the exercise. He’s here to deal with his subconscious and if this is where it brought him, then it was here that he needed to be.

It feels like a spring morning, he thinks. The air is cool, but it doesn’t have the same bite that autumn does, nor is it cold enough to be winter. There’s a blanket of fog and dew over the land. As he walks he sees the new blooms, the foliage reawakening after a long winter. It’s lush in its own way, all greens and greys. A solemn beauty. It’s quiet as well, almost uncannily so.

The main house looms ahead, stark and cold. It’s a grand affair, every bit of it screams old money, a family with a lineage, with titles. He approaches slowly, but no one appears. It starts to get more unsettling, the complete lack of projections. He walks up to the door that leads into the kitchen and pauses, his hand on the knob.

Standing there he can faintly hear the strains of Ella Fitzgerald from inside.

It feels so very familiar. He can’t say he’s nostalgic for his childhood as a rule, but he also can’t deny a certain soft regard he holds for a few things. A few people.

One in particular.

He can only hope that she’s more like herself this time. Less of the cruel imitation from last time.

He turns the handle quietly and enters, he doesn’t do anything to announce himself, and he stops in the doorway to take it in.

The whole room looks just as he remembers, the kitchen on a lower level of the house, harkening back to the time in which it was built. Not that his family conducted themselves much differently from his ancestors, they had staff too, they separated themselves into class hierarchy just as stiffly.

She’s standing at the counter, swaying to the music. She looks exactly as he remembers too. Young, somewhere in her early twenties. Her sartorial choices dated to the same era as her music taste, all big band and old jazz.

He lingers in the doorway until she looks over her shoulder at him and smiles. “Let me put the kettle on.”

She does, moving around with the easy familiarity she always commanded in the kitchen. Once the kettle’s on the flame she turns to face him and gives him a more thorough lookover. 

“You’ve been having a hard time of it, hm?”

He nods, just barely.

“Come, sit,” she says, gesturing to the table, “Tell me about it.” She takes a seat and waits for him to join her.

He takes a seat at the table, the seat he always used to sit in and he feels too large. He should be smaller, it throws him.

“So,” she says, all patient calm and understanding, “Tell me about this mess you’re in.”

“I…” He says hesitantly, “I may have… made a few errors in judgement recently.”

“Your impulsive nature is news?” She teases gently.

He shrugs slightly.

“So, these errors?”

He feels young under her gaze. He fidgets, just a little, and bites his lip. He knows she isn’t judging him, but he feels antsy anyway because he doesn’t want to admit anything that might disappoint her. “I was—there was…”

“A boy?” She asks with a small smile.

“Well. Yes, I suppose. But that’s not all. Or… it is, but it isn’t.”

“You messed up with him?”

“I messed up thinking I could be with him.” He looks over the table, he doesn’t want to look her in the eye. “I’m… well, you know how I am. What I am.”

She reaches across the table and lays one of her hands over his. It feels so much smaller than he remembers. “What is it you think you are?”

He fidgets more, but doesn’t pull his hand back. He glances around the kitchen and god, but he feels small. Small, and yet, far too large. “Not real. Not—not a real person.”

“Oh, a stóirín,” she says, so achingly soft. The pet name caresses his ears like a familiar old blanket. Warm and soft and inviting. It makes him want to curl up in her arms and let her soothe his worries, just as she used to. It makes him wish every childhood fantasy of escape he’d had had been real. It makes him wish, with a keen ache he hasn’t let himself think of in years, that she had been everything he’d wanted her to be.

She lifts her hand to cup his cheek and turn his head to face her. He can feel how his stubble catches slightly against the skin of her palm and that isn’t right, but her sad and fond expression is. He realizes he’s started to tear up and tries to blink them back before they fall, swallowing hard against the burning in his throat.

“You said I was yours,” he whispers thickly, “When… last time. You said I was yours. You said you _mourned_ me.”

“A stóirín,” she says again, sounding regretful.

 _Little darling_. That’s what she told him it meant when he asked. He’d researched it later, when he was trying to find out more about Ireland and found sources that said it was ‘little treasure’. When he told her that she’d laughed and said sure, that was the literal translation, but the French called their children ‘mon petit chou’ and that translated to ‘my little cream puff’, but it _meant_ ‘darling’ too.

“I could’ve been yours. If you’d just—” He chokes on it, breaks off. He takes a few steadying breaths and tries again, a little softer, “I could’ve been yours…”

Her face is soft and patient. “I don’t think your parents would’ve taken kindly to a kidnapping.”

He huffs bitterly, that’s easier to talk about. “Like they’d have noticed.”

“They would have noticed that. And I’d have been arrested and then where would we be?”

He knows she’s right. He knows there was nothing she could have done, but that doesn’t stop the old childish hurt from welling up inside him.

“You… you were my—“ He breaks off again. He can’t say it.

She smiles at him sadly and shakes her head. “I wasn’t. You just wanted me to be.”

He wants to say something to that. Insist she _was_ , but he knows she wasn’t. All he had were childhood delusions and doomed hope. He swallows hard, trying to lock the emotions down again before they overwhelm him.

The whistle of the kettle breaks the moment and she lets go of his face, standing and going over to the stove.

He takes a shuddering breath, sniffing hard and wiping his hands over his eyes while her back is turned. Foolish. Utterly absurd that he’s about to cry over a _projection_ of someone he hasn’t seen in years. It isn’t her, it’s a recreation of his memory of her. It’s his own subconscious, he’s talking to himself.

But she feels real. Realer than last time.

Approaching footsteps have him breaking from that line of thought and he looks over to see who it is.

His mother walks in a moment later and he freezes and watches her, waiting to see what she’ll do, but her eyes slide right over him like he’s a piece of furniture.

He doesn’t know why he thought, even momentarily, that it would be any different with a projection of her.

She walks through the kitchen in that floaty distracted way she had. When he was younger he thought she moved like a ballerina, swaying and gliding silently. Now that he’s older he thinks she was too dazed to do anything but sway most of the time.

“Ma’am.”

“Aoife,” she says, acknowledging the woman she hired to raise her son, even if she won’t acknowledge said child. “The party this weekend, I’ll need you to bring the boy down for a moment in the early evening, but after that keep him occupied and quiet upstairs.”

“Would it be better for us to be elsewhere? I could take him to—”

“No, no,” his mother interrupts, “I want you to bring him in for an appearance at the start of the evening. He’s been… learning to play piano, yes?”

Aoife nods. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Good, he can show something he’s learnt and then you’ll take him.”

“I don’t want to,” Eames says.

His mother doesn’t appear to have noticed he spoke, but Aoife spares him a glance. There’s a little worry line on her forehead. She looks back at his mother. “Of course, ma’am.”

His mother nods, dismissing the conversation as done and sorted.

He thinks about yelling at her, trying to get a rise out of her, but the impulse comes and goes and he doesn’t say a thing. She wouldn’t care, it wouldn’t matter. She starts to float back out the way she came, when there’s a slam of a door upstairs.

The three of them freeze. A beat passes, and then the yelling starts.

The words are indistinct, but his father’s voice and furious tone are unmistakable. It continues on, a roar of fury until there’s the sharp crash of glass shattering.

Aoife hovers closer to him now. Standing behind where he’s still seated at the table.

His mother reaches in her pocket and pulls out a bottle, it rattles loudly in the now quiet room as she taps a pill into her hand, then dry swallows it.

Another moment passes and things stay quiet. His mother pockets the bottle and walks out. Aoife squeezes his shoulder. “Next weekend how about we go to London? We’ll have the house all to ourselves and we can build a great big fort and leave it up the whole weekend.”

It sounds like exactly the sort of fun distraction she used to offer him when things got particularly bad. Just the two of them in the London house, under a blanket fort having a movie marathon. Taking him to the zoo, to the beach. If his parents were in London, then it was a weekend away at the country house.

It feels so much like it did, but Eames can tell things are different. The dream may be based on a memory, but it’s certainly not exact. The ambiance, the people, they’re right, but some of the details are off. He doesn’t think his mother ever actually called him “the boy” in front of him like that, even if she always said his name in the same tone one might say that. He does know for a fact that she kept her precious valium stash in her bathroom, she never would have walked around with a prescription bottle on her person. That was below her, to appear to rely on them so overtly. She may have spent her days in a haze of benzos, but she carefully crafted her appearance and a pill bottle in pocket didn’t fit.

“London sounds fun,” he says.

Aoife smiles at him and he can see the relief there, over the underlying stress.

For all that he thought of her as very grown up and sophisticated as a child, she really was quite young. Too young, really, to be saddled with the burden of raising an unwanted child in a household that was alternately frigid and combative. A child who wasn’t even hers.

“I’m going out to the garden,” he says. The room is starting to feel like it’s closing in on him and he needs to get out. He needs to run before everything gets too claustrophobic.

She nods and lets him go.

He shuts the door behind him and takes a few deep breaths, the air is still that cool fresh spring morning air and it’s a relief. He feels it in his lungs and he starts to settle again. It’s quiet outside, but it’s not the oppressive quiet of the house. The quiet of the house was more like a threat than a peace.

He walks along the path into the gardens, looking over the landscaping. Dew still clings to leaves and there’s still a low mist hanging over the trees. He shoves his hands in his pockets and continues walking. Maybe it was a mistake to leave the house. After all, if the projections are all inside he should probably be in there hashing things out.

He really doesn’t fancy the idea of running into his father, though. Not even a projection of him. The brief sound of him upstairs was more than enough.

He turns the corner around some tall box hedges and comes to an abrupt stop as he takes in a projection of Arthur just a little ways up the path ahead of him. He’s shocked, but he supposes he shouldn’t be. This is his own subconscious and it’s throwing things at him that have been present lately. The situation with Arthur has been on his mind and so it tracks that a projection of Arthur would show up here.

He is uneasy though, having Arthur on the estate. He doesn’t want to do this with him here. He doesn’t want either thing separately, much less combined.

“Eames,” Arthur says. He sounds a little cold, but not like he was the last time Eames saw him. Not enraged, not icily cold. Professionally cold, perhaps.

“Arthur,” Eames says back, cautiously.

Arthur sniffs and looks him over. He doesn’t look impressed. “So this is where you grew up?”

“Partially,” Eames says, “We had a house in London too. And do you count school as a location for growing up if you boarded?”

Arthur doesn’t answer, instead he looks around the grounds before settling his gaze back on Eames. “You aren’t worth it,” he says.

“What?”

“That’s what you were wondering. With me. The answer is no, you aren’t worth it.”

Eames frowns. “I was good up until… well, the end wasn’t—but before that I was good.”

Arthur snorts dismissively. “Sure, you sucked my cock the way I like and you have enough intelligence to hold a conversation with, but you really think I can’t find that with someone better? Someone who isn’t also a project to be figured out? Someone who’s an actual _person?_ ”

“I’m a person,” Eames protests, but it sounds weak even to his own ears. He leaves out that he knows he isn’t a whole person, a real person. That his personhood is fractured and incomplete. He knows this, but he doesn’t want to let Arthur win so easily. He can lie, he’s good at lies.

“No,” Arthur says, “You’re damaged goods with more baggage than personality. In fact, your baggage is what you have _instead_ of a personality.” He pauses just a moment, not long enough for Eames to formulate a response. “I mean Christ, Eames, your parents didn't even want you and they’re your _parents_. It’s no wonder no one else does.”

“I can—I could fix—“ Eames’ heart is pounding and he’s losing the threads of his argument. It usually comes easier to him than this, but he’s breaking out in a sweat and he can’t think.

“You don’t even know what to fix because you aren’t enough of a person to know the root of where you went so wrong.”

What can he possibly say to that? It’s true, he knows it’s true. He knows it to his core and his projection of Arthur knows it too.

“You aren’t anything,” Arthur continues, “You’re inherently _nothing._ How can anyone love that? You can’t love nothing, and that’s all you are.”

Eames’ mind flashes to Aoife. She loved him, she used to tell him that. He used to see it in her eyes when she sang him lullabies, when she pet his hair to soothe him, when she—

“Fucking pathetic,” Arthur interrupts Eames’ thoughts, “She was _paid_ to take care of you and you still think she was your mother. She wasn’t. She was only there for the money.”

He wants to protest that, but he knows it’s true. He knows it and he hates it. He wants to yell and argue and throw everything he can back in Arthur’s face. He wants to make Arthur feel gutted, truly gutted, as he does now. He wants to take that knife that Arthur so handily twists and make it real, take it in hand and turn it on himself and slice out every bit that aches until he’s cut out those clinging shards of fractured self and he’s truly hollow. Nothing can hurt him if he’s hollow, nothing can touch him if he’s purged all those broken bits.

Arthur watches him and he can’t tell if it’s more pity or disgust on his face, but Eames knows he hates it. He starts to turn on his heel, determined to at least make the most dignified escape he can, given that he’s apparently too tongue-tied to cut Arthur back, but then with a dread-filled certainty he knows. He just _knows_ his father is coming up the path. He can’t say how he knows, just that he does.

The idea of having to confront his father and Arthur at the same time is far, far, too much.

“He was right about you,” Arthur says, “And you’re right about you too. I didn’t believe you at first, but I do now. You—”

Eames has dreamt up a gun and shot himself in the head before Arthur finishes his sentence. The last thing he hears is Arthur’s voice and his father’s footsteps just coming round the bend.

He wakes with a start and blinks rapidly, recentering himself to reality. He’s topside, he’s in Mombasa, he’s in Yusuf’s office. He wills his hands not to shake from the last dregs of his dreamstate panic coursing through him.

Yusuf comes to his side while he’s busy taking out his line. Yusuf’s frowning and looks at the PASIV. “Did something happen? That wasn’t fifteen minutes.”

Eames gets the line out and exerts all of his will into steadying his voice. “Got off track, it’s fine.”

“Off track?”

“The compound, it—I wasn’t here for that.”

“What happened?”

Eames is already on his feet, trying to make sure he’s set to rights and ready to leave. “It makes the projections act… odd. Better than last time, but not what I—I didn’t want—“

Yusuf frowns harder and watches him. “Are you okay? What do you mean ‘odd’?”

“Fine, fine, thank you. Peculiar,” Eames spits out answers rapid fire. “Pleasure doing business as always, have a lovely day.” It takes everything in him not to sprint out of there, but he keeps it to a moderate power walk. He can hear Yusuf calling after him and he hates to make a scene because he knows it’s only drawing attention to himself and his state, but he truly can’t stand to be in that stuffy little office with an audience a moment longer.

He weaves his way through the city until he gets back to his flat. He shuts and locks the door behind him, going through his usual safety procedures and with that done, heads directly for his liquor cabinet.

Mombasa wasn’t the right call. Nor was dreaming. He needs something else, some other distraction or something, anything, to get him out of his head.

He pours himself a drink and tosses it back, then pours another.

He needs a new plan. He thinks maybe being Eames isn’t what he needs right now. He doesn’t need to kill Eames. Certainly, nothing of enough magnitude has happened to warrant killing Eames. The little… _issue_ , with Arthur. That’s nothing, that’s less than nothing. It’s a stupid little thing that has him wrong-footed for whatever reason, but he’ll steady himself soon. He just needs a break, a little holiday. A new identity until he’s sorted out his silly little episode and can return to Eames. Normal Eames.

A plan comes together quickly in his mind. A simple coin toss determines his destination, Aruba or Monte Carlo (Aruba wins). With that decided he merely has to pack his bag, book a flight and accommodation. Fast, simple.

He spends his time as he travels crafting his new identity. Someone fun, someone with little responsibility. Someone without worries or baggage. Someone he can slip on and have a little holiday in.

James, he thinks. No, Jimmy, says his gut. Jimmy. Jimmy the New Yorker. He’ll have to put on an accent, but broad American isn’t too difficult. He decides that Jimmy, while from New York City, has a very standard Mid-Atlantic American accent, nothing too specific to any borough of New York. He’s a city boy in a big enough city that he was exposed to a melding pot of accents and slang and so he’s got little touches of many over a very standard base.

Jimmy’s on vacation because Jimmy has money and likes to have a good time. Not too much money, mind. But Jimmy isn’t poor. He doesn’t come from the slums, nor from the upper echelons.

Jimmy likes to gamble, Jimmy likes to party, Jimmy likes to be looked after.

He wonders if he’s on the wrong side of thirty now, to play arm candy, which is undeniably what Jimmy is. A little dim, a touch vulnerable, very pretty, and extremely easy—provided you can pay. He still knows how to put on the act, and if it was a dream and he could forge he wouldn’t think twice. But he’s a little older, a little more built than the last time he did it in his own body. It may put potential marks off.

He resolves to try it and see. If it doesn’t work he can always create himself into someone else.

He goes shopping with an eye for Jimmy’s taste, careful to pick clothes that make him look younger. He styles his hair to look like Jimmy. He practices Jimmy’s voice, his expressions, the way he carries himself. He stares at himself in the mirror until it’s Jimmy that stares back at him.

Then he hits the casinos.

Jimmy isn’t as good a gambler as Eames. Jimmy spends a little more time trying to make himself available and chatting people up than he does focusing on the tables. That’s okay though, he’s there more to have fun than to win big. Luckily, Jimmy has access to Eames’ funds so there’s no issue.

He starts hitting the clubs more than the casinos as he realizes that Jimmy really does prefer the party. Jimmy likes the idea of gambling more than the reality. Jimmy also would prefer to have a rich benefactor who he could shadow and be adored by at the tables.

He’s arm candy. It’s a nice break.

There’s also the little side issue of Arthur. Or, the lingering memory of Arthur. It’s more present in the casinos and Eames keeps shoving it down further and further. The sights, the sounds, they bring it back to the fore and he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to think about Arthur, about Vegas, about that last night.

The clubs are a success and Eames does more dancing than he has in a long time. Not that club dancing is _dancing_ so much as a clothed precursor to sex. Jimmy likes that, though. Jimmy likes to be on the floor, being watched.

The first couple nights end in drinks with fellow good time partiers. He starts to settle into that as a routine and it’s easy, it’s so laughably easy. He wakes when he wants and eats and sometimes he goes swimming and then every night he’s out again. Drinking and dancing and availing himself of the plentiful eager partners to touch and kiss and fuck.

It’s good, but he starts to itch for more. It’s a distraction, but it starts to feel like it’s slipping away through his fingers. Things that don’t belong to Jimmy are simmering just under the surface and he doesn’t want them to come up any higher. He wants them buried deep, deep down. He wants to forget his past, forget Eames, and especially forget Arthur. He parties harder, stays out later, gets a little riskier.

He’s at a club and someone has weed and invites a whole group of them back to a suite at a hotel not too far away and Eames goes. Gets high with the whole group of them, giddy and a little touchy feely and he makes out with almost everyone there, blows one guy in the bathroom while everyone else is still smoking on the balcony. It’s a good time. Jimmy likes it.

Jimmy wants more.

“I’m Drew,” says the man that’s been eyeing him up all night. He’s back out at a club and he’s been dancing. Having fun and showing off. Showing off even more when he noticed his audience.

“Drew?” It’s loud, the bass is thumping and people are talking.

The man nods, leans in closer to speak into his ear, his breath a whisper caress that Eames leans into. “Short for Andrew, but I was never really an Andy.”

Eames smiles. “Jimmy,” he says, and then he presses up against Drew. “Short for James, but I’ve always been a Jimmy.”

Drew’s hands come down to hold onto his hips and Eames presses into the touch, eager. Jimmy likes the look of Drew. He’s a little older than most of the patrons, but not outrageously so. He’s wearing expensive clothes, expensive cologne. He looks like exactly the kind of man Jimmy likes best.

“You looked like you were having fun out there.”

“Liked watching me?”

Drew pulls Eames tighter against his body and Eames lets him. “Very much.”

“ _How_ much?” Eames is grinning and biting at his lips, not nervous, just trying to plump them up a little more, draw Drew’s eye.

It works.

“How much would you like?”

“Buy me a drink, much?”

Drew laughs. “Sure, but is that really all you want?”

“Depends how good the drink is.” Eames winks and pulls Drew towards the bar. He lets Drew crowd up behind him, press him to the bartop while he orders, get a little handsy while they wait. He leans back against Drew’s chest while he takes his first sip.

“Good?” Drew asks in his ear.

Eames nods and downs the rest of it. He leans back and turns his head so Drew can hear him better. “Very. But can you do better?”

Drew tightens his hold on him. “Why don’t you come back to my hotel with me and I’ll show you?”

Jimmy’s a little bit in love. Or lust. It might be the same thing where Jimmy’s concerned.

They get back to Drew’s room easily, it isn’t too far from the club. It’s nice, an expensive suite. Jimmy’s pleased.

Drew gets him through the door, still handsy, but Jimmy likes that too.

“So you said you could do better?” Eames asks, a little giggly and the teasing sort of daring.

Drew laughs and pulls away. “Well, I do have a fully stocked minibar…”

“Mh-hm.”

“And,” Drew says, walking over to the other side of the room and pulling out a baggie of white powder, “This.” He holds it aloft and gives it a little shake. “If you’re interested.”

Jimmy’s very interested. The weed the other night was good, but the coke promises even better. It’s been a long time since he’s done it, but he remembers the high being big. Much bigger than weed. Warm and strong and powerful. He wants that. Still, though he may be a bit reckless, there’s enough Eames lingering in him that he’ll wait for Drew to snort the first line. Just to be sure.

Drew seems pleased by how eager Jimmy is and he cuts lines for them. Eames isn’t sure if Drew plans to be a gentleman and offer him the first go or not, so he gets up and helps himself to the minibar, keeping an eye on Drew while making sure to look like he isn’t.

Drew snorts a line and settles back on the couch so Eames rejoins him, drinks in hand. He kneels by the table and sets them down, then snorts his own. He sniffs a few times after. It’s doing its job and numbing quickly, but he still has an impulse to sniff and blink his eyes. It’s good, high grade. He’s not a connoisseur, but he can tell it feels like what he remembers. It doesn’t sting like it’s cut with something low quality.

Drew watches him with a smile. “Been a while, hm?”

Eames nods. “Mostly do molly these days… poppers sometimes, but not so much anymore.” Jimmy is a party boy, he likes uppers and having a good time. He also likes to feel special, pretty. He likes to know he’s got a man watching him, appreciating him. Definitely a bit of an exhibitionist, but Eames hasn’t quite figured out the extent yet.

“I bet you’re a treat on molly.”

Eames grins at him, slow and decadent. “I’m a treat without it too.”

“Come here, pretty boy.”

And _oh_ Jimmy thrills at that. He snorts another line for good measure, just to show he’s a bit of a brat, a bit of a tease, but then he climbs up on the couch and settles against Drew.

“I can’t believe no one snatched you up yet, look at this mouth…” Drew runs his fingers over Eames’ lips and Eames parts them, teasing his tongue against Drew’s fingertips.

“Guess I was just waiting on a man like you.”

“Oh,” Drew laughs, “Flattery gets you everywhere.”

“That and my mouth.”

Drew rubs his thumb over Eames’ bottom lip. “That and your mouth, indeed.”

Eames throws a leg over Drew and settles sitting in his lap, straddling him. 

He’s flying high and it feels so good. He feels so good. Big and brilliant and invincible. On top of the world with energy and confidence. Drew’s hands on him, his mouth, it feels like worship. It feels so good and it’s so easy to drink and do coke and follow Drew to bed, to kiss him and fall into those grasping hands. He’s laughing and moaning and the rapture he feels as Drew sings his praises, tells Jimmy how pretty he is, how perfect. It’s unparalleled.

His orgasm is a bright hot burst of pleasure and he settles into Drew’s bed for the afterglow, panting and smiling and not quite cuddling, but not shying away from him either.

Drew sits up a little and sets his hand on Eames’ chest, taps his fingertips lightly. “What brings you to Aruba?”

Eames shrugs. “Just lookin’ to have fun.”

Drew laughs. “Young and no responsibilities, huh? No fun to be found back home?”

Eames shrugs again, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth for a moment, then says, “I broke up with my… or, well, maybe he broke up with me. We broke up.”

“Your boyfriend?”

“I left him.”

It’s not part of the backstory he created for Jimmy, it’s some of Eames slipping through. No, not Eames, not exactly. Arthur’s Eames.

“What happened?”

Eames didn’t mean to say any of this, not really, but he finds it coming out anyway. He frowns. “I… we had a fight.”

Drew hums consideringly and rubs his hand down Eames’ chest. “And he pissed you off enough that you left him to come to Aruba?”

Eames huffs. Or, Jimmy huffs. He is Jimmy right now and Jimmy has strong opinions. “He’s such a fucking bitch, acting like he knows me! Or—he doesn’t know _shit_. But he’s so—so—“ He’s frustrated and not quite sure what to say. He knows how Jimmy talks, but how does Jimmy talk about Arthur? Arthur is part of Eames. It’s confusing and there are these looming feelings threatening to be dredged back up from where Eames had buried them down.

“He was your age?” Drew asks, calmly.

Eames nods.

“Too young,” Drew says, moving closer, “He didn’t know how to handle you, give you what you need.” He says it so honey smooth and punctuates with a pinch to Eames’ nipple.

Eames gasps and arches under him. There’s something so appealing about this lie. Letting Drew think he’s in charge. Becoming Jimmy for him. He wants to let go, be Jimmy. He wants to be exactly what Drew thinks he is, what Jimmy is.

But now that Arthur’s been brought up it lingers, the whole situation sours. He’s lying in bed, not with Arthur. He’s created himself into someone he doesn’t think Arthur would even spare a second glance and that hurts. The hypothetical of Arthur’s rejection hurts. The _reality_ of Arthur’s rejection hurts.

Everything he did to lead up to Arthur’s rejection weighs on him. He knows he didn’t handle it well, he knows why Arthur was mad. He knows he created a fight and he knows he did it because he didn’t know what else to do. He’s still not quite sure what to do, but he needs to do something. Running, distractions, they aren’t working. Nothing he’s tried is truly working.

Jimmy’s been the most successful so far and even he cracked and let some of Eames slip through. Arthur’s Eames.

“Jimmy, pretty boy, where’s your head at, hm?”

Eames turns his head to look at Drew. Drew, who’s handsome and flattering and so truly unlike Arthur. Worlds away from Arthur. Nowhere near as good as Arthur.

“I…” He isn’t sure what to say.

“Shh,” Drew says, “Let me give you what you need.”

It’s so easy, Jimmy wants it. He wants to be taken care of so Eames lets him.

They have another round before everything catches up with him and Eames falls asleep. He wakes up disoriented and hungover, but he isn’t groggy. He’s too well trained to wake with alertness for that. It’s only a few moments for him to take in that he’s nude, he’s in someone else’s bed, and he isn’t alone.

There’s a momentary false hope as he thinks, Arthur, but he squashes that. It can’t be Arthur.

The night before comes back to him and he remembers… a D name. He opens his eyes and spots the man and it comes back to him, Drew.

Drew stretches and winces a little. “‘Morning.”

Eames hums out a vague acknowledgement.

Drew gets up and goes to the bathroom and he’s a nice enough guy, what Eames can remember of the sex was good. The drink and drugs were good. But he also remembers letting slip about Arthur and he doesn’t want to face that at all. He gathers his clothes and slips out before Drew reemerges.

He gets back to his own hotel and he feels fucked up. He feels more fucked up than he did the night before, drunk and high. It’s the sobering light of day, perhaps, but it only makes him feel worse. Makes him want to rush back into that warm embrace of night.

He’s booking a ticket to New York and checking out of his hotel before he has time to think through a plan. He’s working on instinct, Jimmy’s instinct. Jimmy feels off so Jimmy wants to go home. New York City is Jimmy’s home and so, that’s where Eames finds himself.

Eames has been to New York before, multiple times. But Eames’ New York and Jimmy’s New York are two very different cities. That’s the nice thing about New York, it’s big enough that it contains those multitudes. Jimmy has no concern for what Eames may or may not have done there, who he saw, where he went. Jimmy knows what he wants and it’s easy, it’s so easy.

Jimmy dresses up to go out. Jimmy heads straight for the nightlife, throws himself into the gay clubs with little concern for New York in the daytime. Jimmy lets men buy him drinks and kiss him and grope him and some he even lets take him into back alleys, into taxis, into hotel rooms.

Jimmy eyes pretty little pills slipping easily through fingers, lets them press easily into his mouth. Turns out, Drew was right, Jimmy’s a delight on molly. He’s hedonistic and shameless and enough of a pleasure-seeking exhibitionist to make a real show of it.

Jimmy loves it. Jimmy wants more.

Eames is the one who picks up after Jimmy in the mornings, though. Jimmy’s there for the party, but he’s not so big on the aftermath. Eames isn’t a fan either, but needs must. He gets Jimmy out of wherever he got himself to the night before, cleans him up. He doesn’t let himself think too hard about it though, doesn’t let the hollow ache he feels turn into anything. He pushes it down, pushes it down. He slips back into Jimmy and has another night on the town.

It’s a sustainable system, until it’s not. It works, until it doesn’t.

It’s so, so good. So very, very easy. Until it isn’t.

Jimmy wakes up and he doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know who he’s with. He doesn’t know what he took or drank, but he can tell he did plenty of both. He aches, inside and out and he hates it. So he slips away and he lets Eames back to the fore.

Eames doesn’t like it either, but unlike Jimmy, what he wakes to goes beyond unpleasant. It scares him. It’s a harsh cold sobering moment where he realizes he has to stop. He has to clean himself up and get himself out and let Jimmy go.

Back in his own hotel room he freshens up, changes clothes, eats a little room service, and then sits down to have a moment with himself. To figure things out.

Jimmy was a fun and successful distraction, perhaps a mite bit too successful. But being Jimmy was only ever supposed to be a holiday and it’s clearly a holiday that’s long gone off the rails. It was supposed to distract him from his problems and in some ways it has, but in others it hasn’t. 

For all that the late nights give him other things to occupy his mind, they haven’t done away with his worries. He still thinks of Arthur, still thinks of what happened in Vegas. Still has his regrets and his wishes and this horrible ache inside where he wishes he could go back and do it differently this time. Be better this time. Take himself and make himself into someone better, someone who doesn’t do all these things that he does.

He may not be a whole person, but in a bizarre twist he thinks that may just give him an advantage here. If he can think, can plan with a clear head, maybe he can make Eames into someone better. Someone who wouldn’t push Arthur away, someone who would be worthy of what Arthur was trying to give him before he panicked and ruined it.

But first, he needs to find Arthur. He thinks this needs to be done in person, not via phone or email. Which requires finding out where Arthur is.

It doesn’t take too much research for him to determine Arthur’s in California. With Cobb.

There’s a low stab of hurt to that, but Eames brushes it aside.

He tosses out everything of Jimmy’s. He shaves. He puts back on Eames’ clothes and tidies himself up, but tries to make sure it doesn’t look like he’s trying too hard. He packs his bag and books his ticket and arrives in California with a bit of a plan and a lot of uncertainty.

He does get a hotel, he doesn’t think showing up with his luggage will be received well. He doesn’t want to push his luck.

It’s sunny and cheerful and bright in California. He freshens up in his hotel room, puts on clothes that belong to Eames. Something flattering, but not too much. Nothing that makes it seem like he’s looking for more than Arthur is willing to give.

The taxi ride from his hotel to Cobb’s house is both longer and shorter than it should be. He’s not sure if he’s ready, yet he doesn’t want to wait a moment longer. The wait is the worst, he wants to have it over and done.

He knocks on the door and waits. Maybe he should have called ahead, or maybe it’s best to do it this way and not give Arthur the opportunity to screen his calls. Maybe he’s about to have the door slammed in his face, who knows.

So very little time passes between his knock and the door swinging open to reveal Arthur.

He looks good, well rested and dressed well. Not dressed up, but normal casual. He also doesn’t look mad, nor does he look overtly welcoming. Mild, Eames thinks, he looks mild.

“Hello,” Arthur says, sounding just as mild as he looks.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to everyone who commented! I do love to see people’s thoughts!
> 
> Update much faster than normal as I am still at home and trying my best to be productive, as most all of us should be. Home that is, not necessarily productive. So long as you’re staying home I don’t think you need to be at all productive with your time unless you want to, or must.

Arthur lets him into Cobb’s house with little fanfare. He’s polite. A little distant maybe, but not standoffish.

Arthur shows him inside and they settle in the kitchen.

“There’s coffee in the pot,” Arthur says.

“Thank you.”

Arthur nods and pours them each a mug.

“Where’s Cobb?”

“He took the kids out, they won’t be back for a few hours.”

Eames nods and settles the mug between his palms. The heat is nice, comforting.

Arthur takes a sip and watches him.

“I’m sorry,” Eames says. Arthur sets his mug down and before he can speak Eames continues, “I didn’t mean it.”

“Yes, you did,” Arthur says, matter of factly, “You were trying to upset me.”

“Just because I meant it to upset you, doesn’t mean I said things that were true.”

“There had to be some truth there or you wouldn’t have thought to say any of it.”

Eames pauses for a moment, considering how he wants to answer. “You are fastidious and a touch bitchy. But… you’re beyond competent. You’re thorough and brilliant and careful. You’re imaginative and creative and fucking deadly. I can’t imagine anyone doing what you do half as well.”

“I thought I had no imagination?”

“I’ve seen your paradoxical architecture, you have imagination. Hell, you imagined up a way to give a kick in zero gravity. You just… you have your feet more firmly planted in reality too. You aren’t given to flights of fancy, but that’s good. That’s vital. Because you poke holes in plans until they’re waterproof.”

“So you came here to flatter me?”

“It’s true. And I am sorry,” Eames tries to make it clear how much he means that in his voice. He truly does regret how everything happened and he’s glad Arthur’s willing to even entertain hearing him out now. “I… do this. Push people. I don’t know why.”

“Okay,” Arthur says and that surprises Eames. It seems like too simple an acceptance.

Arthur makes a face like he knows what Eames is thinking and elaborates, “I don’t mean it’s _okay_ , but I understand. You have an impulse to lash out. I knew you were doing it on purpose while we were fighting. You were trying to manipulate my feelings and upset me.”

That leaves Eames feeling a little unmoored. A petulant voice inside him wants to demand why, if Arthur knew what he was doing, didn’t Arthur stop him? Why didn’t he come after him? He knows it isn’t fair and he’s the one who needs to apologize, but he wants to know why he wasn’t worth Arthur trying.

“Then why…” He trails off, he knows he shouldn’t say any of those things.

“Just because I understand what you were doing, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. You have reasons to lash out, but you don’t get to take it out on me.”

“You did it for Cobb.” Even as the words leave his mouth, Eames knows he fucked up. He’s here to apologize, not antagonize Arthur further. He needs to get control of himself, temper his impulses.

Arthur’s watching him carefully. “Yes. So I know firsthand what it means to go down that road. I know you can’t save someone from themselves.”

Eames isn’t sure what to say to that so he just nods and looks back down at his coffee. Arthur’s right. He’s right to know you can’t do that and he’s right that after everything he went through with Cobb he knows that fact better than most.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur says and Eames looks up in surprise. “Not about leaving. But I’m sorry about what I said and I…” He sighs. “I know I fucked up too. I started all of this by testing you, not communicating. I was pushing you. I do that. I come up with a plan and then I force an agenda. You pushed back.”

“We pushed each other, I suppose.”

Arthur makes a low humming noise and Eames thinks it’s in agreement, but it might just be indicative of listening. A sound to fill the space so Arthur doesn’t have to reply. Or perhaps reply yet, maybe he’s just buying time to think.

Eames takes another sip of his coffee and looks around the kitchen. The house is stylish, the architecture bold and making a statement. He wouldn’t expect anything less. He knows this is the house Cobb lived in with Mal and he can’t imagine Mal would have ever allowed herself to settle in some cookie cutter suburban prefab. He’s also not surprised that Cobb stayed in the house, that fits.

The kitchen is a bit cluttered, there’s a very obvious presence of children. Of a somewhat harried single father. Things aren’t disastrous, but they’re a bit mussed, everything ever so slightly out of place. Crayons on the table and scribbled artwork plastered all over the fridge with magnets. Children’s snacks beside boring cereals and a tiny pair of shoes left abandoned by the door to the back porch.

“Want to step outside?” 

Arthur’s question draws him away from his study of the room. “Sure.”

Arthur leads him out the door to the rather expansive yard. Plenty of open space for the children to run around and play and there are numerous yard toys scattered about to show that they take advantage of it. It’s nice, it seems like a good home for children.

Eames may have his own issues with Cobb, but he can’t say he doesn’t see the man’s positives where his children are concerned. He may not be the best father, but he’s most decidedly not the worst. He might even be said to be solidly decent, which Eames thinks is a fairly high bar for a father to pass.

Arthur looks over the yard too and Eames moves to trying to study him discreetly. He does look good. He always looks good, even dripping in sweat and running on no sleep in the midst of a job gone completely pear-shaped, but right now he looks good and fairly relaxed, which is nice. Or, no, he is slightly tense, but he looks like he’s been relaxing lately. Sleeping and eating well and not doing anything reckless or stupid.

Arthur catches him staring and their eyes meet, but he doesn’t say anything. He just watches Eames back.

“So… you came to California…” Eames says after a moment.

“Yes.”

“To Cobb.”

Arthur watches him steadily, obviously not willing to let things go unsaid now. He’s going to force Eames to say it.

“Is there… something there?”

Arthur snorts. “No. Of all the mistakes I’ve made, pining for my hopelessly straight friend with unbelievable dead wife baggage is _not_ one of them. I’m here because he’s my friend and I wanted to come see him.”

Eames nods. He suspected as much, but it didn’t hurt to check.

“And remind myself of why I shouldn’t chase you down.”

Eames hums, and he means it as an acknowledgement and an agreement, but it’s a harsh enough sentiment that he doesn’t quite know what to say. He wants to think first, but he also wants Arthur to know he hears him, he isn’t ignoring his own mistakes. It would be easier if he wasn’t trying to be genuine. If this was a job, or if he wasn’t trying to be as truthful and transparent as he is, it would be easy. He’s good at talking, good at lying. It’s being open, truly open, that’s hard.

It takes a moment, but then he says, “I know I’m a proper cunt.” He doesn’t say it too jokingly, but he does inject it with some humour. He thinks Arthur will be receptive to that, making light of something that’s also true. He hopes he’s right.

“Not the word I’d use,” Arthur says, barely able to suppress his smile.

“Rat bastard?” Eames tries, “Absolute jackass?” He makes sure to pronounce ‘ass’ the way Arthur does.

“That sounds more like it.” Arthur’s smile has broken through now and Eames is relieved to see it. It means he’s well on his way to forgiven.

He does still have some important things to say though, to make sure Arthur knows. “The girl in the casino, that was nothing. And I don’t mean that in the ‘I fucked her, but it _meant_ nothing’ way. I truly mean it was nothing. She was trying to play me and I was amusing myself playing her right back. It was just a con game, nothing more.”

Arthur nods. “I know, but in the moment it…” He sighs. “It was the last straw in a shitty situation.”

“And then I came in and made it worse.”

“Your impulse to lash out.”

“Hm.” Eames takes a sip of his coffee.

“Do you trust me?” Arthur asks after a moment and his expression is both earnest and searching.

Eames pauses, unsure if he can look directly at Arthur while he thinks that over. He wants to be truthful, and careful with his answer. So he looks over Cobb’s sprawling yard, all lawn and California sunshine in this cheerful American suburb. He feels out of place and almost out of time, like he’s been frozen and cut and pasted into the picture. It’s surreal, but it may not be exactly bad.

“This isn’t a test.” Arthur says, sounding like he might be about to say something else too.

So before he can continue Eames turns to look directly at him. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. I do.”

There’s a weight, a magnitude to that. Eames feels it in his chest and sees it reflected back to him in Arthur’s eyes. They stare in silence until Arthur blinks and nods. “Okay,” he says, “Okay.”

“What do we do with that?”

“I’d like to try again. If you want.”

Eames nods now. “I think I’d like that.”

“We should talk this time. Really talk.”

Eames hums. He was expecting this, he knows they need to. He’s good at talking, he can talk for hours without saying anything at all. It’s saying things that mean something, that’s where the difficulty lies. “Psychoanalysis in the bedroom?”

Arthur snorts. “Have a Freudian fantasy you’ve been itching to try?”

“I was always more partial to Jung.”

Arthur pauses. “I could say something about the Jungian concept of persona here.”

Eames sighs. “Please don’t.”

“No?”

“It was a joke. Like the Freudian fantasy.”

“I know, but that doesn’t mean there’s not something there.”

“I know that.” Eames sets his mug down on the porch railing. He feels the need to pace or twiddle something between his fingers and the mug certainly doesn’t fit the bill. “Christ, of course I know that. And I’m not trying to be difficult, though I know I am, but I don’t want this to be…” He trails off, tapping his fingers along the ledge of the railing for a moment. “If I wanted to be fucked by my psychologist, I’m certain there’s some sleazy doctors I could find to fit the bill.”

“I’m not a therapist.”

“No, but you’re… you’re a…”

“A what?”

“You plan, you analyze, you’re…”

Arthur raises an eyebrow at him. “A control freak?”

“Fixer,” Eames says, not indulging the self deprecating offering, “You’re a fixer. You see problems and you make plans and then you focus in on fixing things. But I… this is who I am. I can’t be fixed.”

“That sounds very defeatist.”

“I’m not saying some maudlin shite like I can’t work on being a better person about it, but this is… it’s essential. Fundamental. I am as I am and there’s no fixing that and if you try you’ll only get frustrated and I’ll never satisfy because you’ll never manage to fix me and you won’t be able to handle it and I won’t handle you not handling it.”

“And that’s fatalistic. I always thought of you as more of an optimist than that.”

“And I always thought you were more realistic than this,” Eames says, frowning.

“Eames, it’s not that I don’t hear you. I do. You have…” Arthur trails off for a moment, then restarts, “The identity thing. It’s serious. It’s been your whole life. I’m not trying to lessen that, but I am saying I think we can talk about it without it being a doctor roleplay or being some hopeless fix-it thing.”

“Says the man who wasted how much of his life trying to fix Dominic fucking Cobb?”

Arthur closes his eyes and blows a steady stream of air between his lips.

“Sorry,” Eames says, “Sorry, I didn’t really mean that.”

“You kind of did.”

“I… yes. Kind of.”

“Lashing out.”

“I believe we’ve established I have a tendency to do that.”

Arthur looks at him more intensely. “I’m going to say this because I want to… I want to lay all the cards out on the table.”

“Alright.”

“I think I put too much pressure on you before. I think… I think we should be more open this time, but I’ll try to back off too.”

“Will you?”

Arthur huffs out a laugh. “I know it doesn’t seem like it after I just pushed you again, but… I think where we fucked up before is we didn’t talk openly enough about it. I pushed, but we didn’t talk, not really.”

“And if I don’t want to talk about it?”

“We don’t have to.”

“No?” That surprises Eames. “Isn’t that… the point of the entire endeavor?”

“No.” Arthur looks away now and Eames can see the tips of his ears have gone red. It’s fascinating and charming. “No, the point… the point was to be with you.”

“But this all started with you yelling at me about acting. You already had me, but then you started up with the whole thing about how I am and how I act.”

“Because I was worried about… I didn’t want you putting up a front with me. I wanted you. I wanted to know I had you and when you said you wanted me you really wanted me.”

“Oh Arthur…” Eames says, a little breathless.

Arthur shrugs a little, looking somewhat uncomfortable. Like he’s been caught out. Eames sticks his foot out and nudges it against the side of Arthur’s, causing Arthur to look at him again.

“I want you,” Eames says.

The tips of Arthur’s ears are so perfectly appealingly red. He ducks his head in a little half nod and then steels his posture, like he’s willing down any embarrassment. “So we’re trying again?”

“We’re trying again.”

They drink their coffee in a more comfortable silence now. Eames knows this isn’t the end of the conversation, just as it isn’t the end of conflict. They’ll fight again at some point, inevitably. But at least now he has a better idea of where Arthur’s at, what he wants. He can keep an eye on himself, on how he reacts. He can temper himself and with any luck he can manage to act in such a way that is comfortable for him, but appealing to Arthur too.

“I think I was trying to do too much to please you last time,” Arthur says, not unkindly.

“I’m not sure if I should be insulted by that or not,” Eames replies with levity.

Arthur rolls his eyes. “I mean… I had fun. But I think I was too focused on you as a project too. Taking you places just for you.”

“What do you suggest? We go some places for you?”

“Is that a problem?”

“Not at all. Merely curious. Where is it you’d like us to go?”

Arthur’s quiet, seeming to mull things over, then says, “Camping.”

“Camping?”

Arthur nods. “Camping.”

“Out in the woods with a tent and all?”

“Yes, unless you have an objection to that.”

“Not at all.” Eames starts to grin. “Please, do take me camping. Shall we make s’mores and tell campfire tales?”

“If you’d like.”

Agreement reached, they spend a bit more time on Cobb’s porch before the man himself returns. It’s no secret entrance, it’s noisy and full of children whooping and Cobb trying and failing to corral them. It isn’t unpleasant though, and Cobb doesn’t sound mad. Just a bit put-upon maybe, but tiredly fond.

Cobb looks a little surprised to see Eames, but not overly. He glances at Arthur none too subtly and Arthur makes some kind of amused grimace in return. Whatever the exchange is, it seems enough that Cobb welcomes Eames. It’s a little stilted and odd, but fine enough. 

Settled home life suits Cobb, for all that he’s a harried single father it looks much better on him than desperate man on the run ever did. He looks a reasonable sort of tired, not strung out and on his last leg. Eames watches him interact with his children and is pleased to see his assessment of solidly decent father rings true. It’s good, he’s happy for the kids, even if their father is Dom Cobb.

Eames is more than ready to leave though and doesn’t protest when Arthur starts to make moves to usher him out. He also doesn’t try to wheedle Arthur into coming with him to his hotel, he just makes plans for their reunion that doesn’t involve Cobb.

It takes a few days for Arthur to pack up and be ready to leave, but most of that time is likely just so he isn’t making an abrupt departure for the children’s sake. They rent some sort of Jeep and load it up with supplies. Arthur puts himself in charge of packing and Eames doesn’t bother to check up on any of it, he figures Arthur knows what he’s doing. He just helps load in the tent, sleeping bags, numerous plastic containers full of who knows what. Arthur did take him out clothes shopping in preparation and they walked out with hiking boots and all sorts of muted tone clothing. Flannels and wool socks and the like. Thin fleece pullovers that Arthur claims they need for the evenings.

Suitably attired and vehicle stocked, they hit the road. Arthur drives, which Eames thinks means he gets to choose the music. He doesn’t bother arguing the point, he just assumes control of the radio. The car is new so he can plug his phone in and then select whatever his heart desires, the wonders of modern technology. He starts off with Frank Sinatra and Arthur smiles.

“So how far into the wilderness are you taking me?”

“Off the beaten path, but not crazy remote. We won’t need to hike to our spot though, I got this car so we could drive, but the plots are far enough apart that we shouldn’t see anyone else.”

“I think I may need to consider whether or not this is an elaborate set up to murder me.”

“How certain are you that it isn’t?”

“Reasonably, but I won’t let my guard down.”

Arthur laughs.

“So, camping,” Eames says.

“Mh-hm.”

“Did you grow up doing a lot of it, or is this a passion you found later in life?”

“I was in 4-H as a kid,” Arthur says.

“4-H? Is that boy scouts?”

“No, it’s… there’s different—the scouts have a very rigid sort of… way they do things. And it’s intensely Christian, so not really something my family was interested in. 4-H started as an agricultural thing, but they expanded into other areas. There’s camping and farming, but there’s also a lot of science and community service. 4-H has lots of different clubs you pick and choose from, like programs centered on specific subjects and interests.”

Eames nods. “So camping started with them?”

“Yeah. It helped with my anxiety.”

“Getting out in nature?”

“Learning survival skills. It made me feel more in control. Like, if catastrophe hit, I had a stronger skillset to deal with it. I learned how to pick locks in case I ever got kidnapped.”

“Really? I learned how to pick locks so I could get my hands on secrets.”

“I was a painfully practical child,” Arthur says, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “And kid you snooping around for secrets doesn’t surprise me at all.”

Eames grins. “You weren’t as much of a trouble maker, then?”

“Oh no, you’d be surprised. I was rigid about rules, but only rules I believed in. I never listened to grown-ups who explained things with ‘because I said so.’ I always insisted on having their reasoning explained logically. If they could make a decent case for it, then I would take it to heart. If they didn’t argue their case well enough, then I didn’t see the point in the rule.”

Eames laughs, utterly charmed. “That must’ve been infuriating to so many adults charged with your care.”

“It definitely was.”

Whatever bit of wilderness Arthur’s decided on for them is a good long drive from Cobb’s. They left in the early morning, Arthur sipping from a sturdy green and steel thermos of coffee he propped up between their seats. Eames offered to take turns driving, but Arthur waved him off saying he liked to do it. Eames doesn’t mind, it gives him more time to lounge and pick music.

The length of their journey does necessitate a few stops though, to refuel the car and themselves. Eames gets back to the Jeep first at their latest stop and gets settled in again, sipping from a rather poorly made cup of coffee (they’d run through Arthur’s provisions hours earlier).

Arthur rejoins him and they get back on the road. Eames finds himself absentmindedly humming along to the stereo, a loose rendition of “Luck Be a Lady” under his breath. He doesn’t really notice he’s doing it until he sees Arthur’s smile and stops. “What?”

“That song suits you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, you should make a playlist of ‘you’ songs.”

“A playlist of ‘me’ songs…” Eames hums. “‘Luck Be a Lady’... ‘The Card Cheat’... ‘Tumbling Dice’...”

Arthur laughs. “So you just listen to gambling based music?”

Eames grins. “Awful lot of good bands write them.”

They lapse into silence for a moment, and Eames watches Arthur as he drives. He’s focused on the road, of course, and looks so perfectly ready for a camping trip. He’s let his hair go loose, they both have, no sense in slicking it down in the woods. He’s wearing a flannel with the sleeves rolled up to just above his elbows, open over a soft tshirt (Eames knows it’s soft from laying his hand on Arthur’s chest during a quick kiss the last time they made a stop—their first kiss since parting ways. It was simple and brief, but thrilling all the same). Eames is dressed in much the same, and they’ve both got their hiking boots on.

“Tell me more about you as a child.”

“Uh,” Arthur says, frowning slightly as he thinks, “Well, I loved sci fi. Still do. Was fascinated by space and aliens.”

“Do you believe in aliens?”

“Of course I do. As vast as the universe is, it’s crazy to think we’re the only life out there. I just think most people’s stories about aliens are bullshit. Especially ancient alien theories, that’s all total bullshit. But aliens definitely exist somewhere out there.”

“Hm, you’re likely right about that.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I don’t think you were a sci fi nerd like me.”

“Ah. No. No, I loved high fantasy and old fashioned detective stories.”

“That fits.”

“Yeah?” Eames laughs lightly. “I suppose it does.”

“I can see you in that uh… what’s that Agatha Christie one with the murders on the boat in Egypt?”

“ _Death on the Nile_. Would I be the murderer trying to match wits with Poirot or the hapless victim?”

“You’d be the dashing rogue picking everyone’s pockets in the background while they were too busy trying to solve the crime.”

Eames laughs. “‘Dashing rogue’? I quite like that, you should write my biography.”

Arthur blushes slightly. “It seemed like a description that fit that type of book.”

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Eames says, smiling. He’s tempted to lean over and kiss Arthur, but the fact that he’s driving ruins that plan. He opts to instead reach over and lay his hand on Arthur’s thigh, not so high that it’s overtly sexual, but high enough to impart a message of intimacy.

Arthur just quirks an eyebrow at him, but he’s smiling too. Eames keeps his hand resting there for a while, until he has to readjust himself in his seat to keep his circulation going.

Arthur wasn’t kidding when he said their spot was off the beaten track, but it’s maintained enough to clearly be a camping ground. They drive deep into the woods, passing by a few rustic cinder block buildings. One appears to be a bathroom, though Eames shudders to think what state it’s in. It’s also a decent walk from the plot Arthur parks by, though not an unreasonable distance.

Eames stretches gratefully once he’s out of the car, his muscles and joints cheering for the freedom of movement. Arthur steps out of the car and takes a deep breath, surveying the surroundings with pleasure.

“So, I assume you have a plan for how you want everything set up?”

Arthur nods. “I’ve got it all packed away in order. Sweep the ground and I’ll get the tent out.”

“Sweep the ground?”

“Yeah, y’know. Sticks, rocks, whatever sharp pointy shit you don’t want to sleep on. Sweep clear a space for the tent.”

“Ah.” Eames sets to doing that, while Arthur wrangles the tent solo. Eames isn’t sure if it’s because it’s a one person task or if Arthur thinks he would do more harm than help, and he doesn’t ask. He just makes sure there’s nothing on the ground except dirt. He does help hammer the stakes into the ground once the tent is set up, though.

Next Arthur unfolds a large rectangle of foam, which goes across the floor of the tent, followed by two unzipped sleeping bags and pillows. Eames is a little disappointed by the prospect of separate sleeping bags until he sees Arthur has laid them out flat, like a top and bottom sheet on top of the foam.

“We can zip them together to form one big two-person sleeping bag if it gets cold enough,” Arthur says, once he’s fixed up the interior of the tent to his satisfaction and is ducking out again.

The tent is nice. It’s got mesh windows and sturdy poles, with an outer shell in case of rain. It’s roomy enough for two full grown men to not be completely on top of each other, though it’s certainly a snugger fit than a room would be.

“Shoes off in the tent,” Arthur says sternly, “When you go in, stick your feet out the flap to take them off, then set them neatly just inside.”

“Yes, sir,” Eames says with a smile.

Arthur’s set up also involves a tarp tied with ropes from the Jeep over the picnic table on their plot and a little camp stove to augment the fire pit on site. Once they’ve got a fire going in the pit, Arthur pulls two beers from the cooler and brings them over to where Eames has set up their camping chairs.

Eames takes his and sips it gratefully. “Lovely set up, very professional.”

Arthur sits beside him. “No reason to half-ass it.”

“Indeed.”

They drink and watch as the fire crackles cheerfully.

“I brought supplies for your s’mores.”

“Did you?” Eames asks, delighted. “I was joking at the time, but I’m glad you did.”

“It’s not really camping without s’mores is it?”

“Are s’mores the delineation?”

Arthur nods. “If you’ve got s’mores, you’re definitely camping. No s’mores? You might be hiding from a price on your head.”

Eames laughs. “Then I’m glad we have the s’mores.”

They get through another few beers over the course of setting up, preparing, and eating dinner. It’s fun and while it’s certainly not high cuisine, there’s a certain type of satisfaction to eating food prepared over an outdoor flame.

“Do you want to talk about your identity?” Arthur asks, once they’ve eaten and washed up and settled in their chairs again.

Eames flicks his finger over the barely peeled edge of the label on his beer bottle. “I don’t know.”

“I’m not trying to pressure you, but I think it’s important to… address at least somewhat.”

Eames shrugs. “Likely, but I have been living this way successfully for a long time.”

“Sure, but just because it’s been a long time doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be changed.”

“Arthur, I told you, I can’t—”

“Be fixed. I know,” Arthur cuts him off, “But you also said that doesn’t mean you can’t work on some things."

“...alright. What in particular are you wishing to discuss?”

“I thought maybe you’d have something…”

Eames shrugs. “Not particularly.”

“Alright, well… if you think of something.”

“Do you have something?”

Arthur takes a sip of his beer. “I don’t want to pressure you.”

“Whatever it is, just ask me.” Eames thinks he would prefer to hear it outright than have to listen to Arthur trying to tiptoe around it.

“Well… so you’ve said some stuff about your parents.”

“Yes?”

“It sounded pretty bad. What little you said and if you’ve had these issues since you were a kid, I mean, that’s indicative of…” Arthur trails off, frowning.

“Of what? Are you going to diagnose me?”

“No, no, I just mean it sounds like it was pretty fucked up and if you wanted to talk about that—”

Eames scoffs. “Look, it wasn’t some horrific _Mommie Dearest_ affair. It was just… as it was.”

“As it was?”

“I’m not saying it was good. Nor am I defending my parents parenting skills, which, I would say were nonexistent. I’m just saying it wasn’t some… whatever it is you seem to be imagining. Endless parade of abuse.”

“So your parents weren’t abusive?”

“I…” Eames trails off. “I suppose that depends on how one defines ‘abuse’ and… if you think about it in degrees. I would say they were mostly ah… neglectful. My mother particularly, she really sort of lived in her own world.”

“And your father?”

“Oh, he did too, but… he was more grounded to reality than her. But part of that was likely her pill habit. She wasn’t really very aware of other people. He was aware. When people angered him.”

“And how did he react to that?”

Eames snorts. “With anger.” His tone implies he thinks it’s a stupid question and he doesn’t bother to hide that. It is a stupid question.

“Did he hit you?”

“Alright, then I suppose they were.” Eames sighs. “Look, alright, yes, my father drank too much and he’d beat me when he remembered I existed, which was whenever he was mad at me. Which was… one of two emotional responses he had to me, anger or indifference. I’m not unaware that beating a child is abusive. I also know that pretending your child doesn’t exist, as my mother did the vast majority of the time, is neglectful and less than ideal. I don’t need you to teach me about my parents shortcomings and how it wasn’t good, I’m well aware.”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“Patronize me?” Eames interjects, “Settle me down on your couch for a nice long session? Please, after I tell you what my father did on my twelfth birthday will you bend me over the back and fuck me? Tell me I’m a good boy and daddy never should have—”

“Eames,” Arthur says sharply.

Eames goes quiet. He knows he misstepped again, he needs to rein it in. He knows that, Arthur told him that.

“Say your piece,” he says, not exactly harshly, but his tone isn’t exactly welcoming either.

“If I had to psychoanalyze you,” Arthur says, “And I’m not trying to be your pervy therapist here. I think you lash out for multiple reasons.” He pauses a moment to see how Eames takes this.

“Reasonable assumption,” Eames says, willing himself to remain calm and let Arthur say this.

“You’re testing the other person’s dedication to you. You want to know if you’re inherently loved or if it’s only because you’re pleasing them. You get overwhelmed and defensive and you want to expose their vulnerabilities first. You want control. You want to be the one to leave or, maybe you're not the one to leave, but you made them leave on purpose.”

Eames knows Arthur is observant and he knows Arthur’s been keeping a particular watch on him, but hearing it all laid out like that surprises him. It catches him off guard and overwhelms him and leaves him at a loss for words. He’s full of contradictory emotions, some part of him pleased to have been given so much attention, another urging him to run, another saying he should list out Arthur’s impulses and shortcomings and see how _he_ likes it, another just wants a kiss. It’s a jumble and a mess and really, that’s his internal state at its core, isn’t it?

“Eames… I do know you, you know,” Arthur says softly. He looks patient and calm.

Eames doesn’t know exactly what he wants to do or say, but he knows that he doesn’t want to face it head-on. He wants to go around sideways, find some other way to tackle it, or evade. He grins and licks his lips, setting his bottle aside and reaching with one hand to grasp Arthur’s knee. “You do know me, don’t you? Rather well in fact, though it may be time to get reacquainted.”

Arthur gives him a look.

“Ah,” Eames says, pausing and pulling back. “Yes, I see.”

_You use sex as a distraction_ , Arthur’s voice echoes in his mind.

“Psychoanalysis in the bedroom…” Eames says quietly, mostly to himself, though Arthur can hear him.

“You said you didn’t want that.”

Eames hums. “I don’t. I just…”

“Wanted to distract me?”

Eames nods, but doesn’t say any more.

Arthur retrieves two more bottles of beer and sets one by Eames’ side. “We aren’t reenacting _Brokeback Mountain_.”

“Pardon?”

“Oh, no not the emotional stuff—well, I mean we aren’t doing that either. But I meant I’m not going to feed you nothing but beans and raw you with no lube in the wilderness.”

Eames chokes on the beer he’d just sipped, but manages to splutter out, “Thank you for that, I’m sure.”

Arthur nods, smiling a little.

While Arthur did offer some levity to get them past the rough patch in their conversation, Eames thinks this is probably as good a time as any to bring up something else he knows he needs to tell Arthur about. It’s something he would’ve mentioned should his haphazard seduction have gone anywhere, though his heart wasn’t really in it so he’s not sure how much follow through there would have been unless Arthur really wanted it.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

Arthur freezes up, looking concerned and perhaps that wasn’t the best opener, but Eames doesn’t know if there’s any good opener on this topic.

“After we parted ways I ah… slept around.” He sees Arthur blanch a little, but continues on, “But I got tested before I rejoined you at Cobb’s and everything came back negative so…”

“Were you worried about that?”

“The tests? I…” He glances away. “I was riskier than I should have been, yes.”

“How risky?”

“I’m clean.”

“ _How_ risky?”

Eames peels the label of his new beer bottle further than he got the other one. “There were drugs involved so. A decent amount of risk.”

“Are we talking weed or harder?”

“Both. But obviously the… narcotics lend more to the concern.”

Arthur blows a slow breath out, like he’s trying to take this in and figure out what to do about it, what his response should be.

“It’s fine, it’s all done now,” Eames hastens to assure him, “The sleeping around and the drugs. It was just a ah… something to do. Keep my mind off things.”

“So you turned to drugs and anonymous sex?”

“Not everyone has wholesome all-American connections.” That toes the line of saying something cutting, but doesn’t cross it.

Arthur lets it be, he just nods. He watches the fire, then looks at Eames. “Thanks for telling me.”

“I was planning to. I wouldn’t have kept it secret.”

Arthur nods again. He stands and stretches, then goes over to the fire. “I’ll put this out if you’re ready for bed?”

“Sure.” Eames watches as Arthur puts out the fire and packs things in for the night. He sits and takes off his boots, as per Arthur’s instructions and sets them just inside the tent. He’s not exactly sure what to expect from Arthur tonight, but he doesn’t think sex is on the menu.

When Arthur joins him he sets his boots beside Eames’ and strips down to just his tshirt and pants, just as Eames had, and slides into place beside Eames on their sleeping bag and foam bed. He doesn’t shy away from Eames, that would be hard to accomplish in such a confined space with shared bedding and his body doesn’t seem to be holding any tension, but his touches are certainly not amorous in nature.

Eames hesitantly presses a little closer, trying to gently test the boundaries and see what is and isn’t welcome, and Arthur obliges.

“C’mere,” Arthur murmurs and lets Eames press until they’re flush together.

He wakes in the morning to the sound of birds chirping, his head resting on Arthur’s chest and their bare legs tangled together. Arthur’s sitting up a little, just barely. Just enough that he has a book in one hand that he sets aside when he sees Eames is awake.

“Good morning, you looked comfortable so I didn’t want to wake you yet, but if you wouldn’t mind letting me up to go piss.”

Eames rolls off, making a sleepy sort of agreeable noise and watches as Arthur shoves his feet in his boots and leaves the tent. He takes advantage of the space and stretches, sprawling his limbs across their makeshift bed. He can hear Arthur doing something outside and after a few minutes leaves the tent to find Arthur has the camp stove on and looks to be getting things ready for breakfast.

There’s a pot of water on and Arthur has both a French press and a box of tea laid on on the picnic table. Eames smiles and helps set up a new fire in the fire pit.

The next few days pass just like that. Rustic food cooked outside, a few hikes around the surrounding woods, Arthur brought a pack of cards so they play some two-person games that always end in Arthur accusing him of cheating. They drink beer and talk about whatever comes to mind. Nothing too intense, but they aren’t tiptoeing around each other either. There’s plenty of shop talk, and they both have fun disparaging fellow dreamers they dislike.

It’s fun and relaxing, though strangely adolescent. They kiss sometimes, and curl up together to sleep every night, but they haven’t had sex. Eames hasn’t even tried to make a pass at Arthur since his ill advised half-hearted distraction attempt and Arthur seems to be fine with that.

Arthur’s also dropped all his attempts at delving into any of Eames’ psychological issues. He’s not pushing, but he also doesn’t seem to be trying to quietly manipulate it out of Eames. He seems to be content to just spend time together and it’s Eames who finds himself mulling things over.

His parents, in particular. Arthur brought them up and his own projections of them are still fresh in his mind. It seems an easier subject than himself. He knows his parents, knows how to describe them. He can talk about how they were far more easily than he can talk about himself, he thinks. Arthur might’ve been right to bring them up, they might be the easiest way in.

And Eames is finding with increasing clarity that he does want to let Arthur in, truly in.

They’ve had their conversations about it. The initial conflict, little things during their holiday, their fight, their reunion. The ill-fated conversation their first night in the woods. Each one has brought them a little further, brought a little more clarity and information, but none has quite managed to lay things bare.

It goes against Eames’ self-preservation techniques, but he’s kidding himself if he thinks he’s really following his own guidelines anymore. He knows he’s not. He knows this is something else entirely and if he didn’t want it he would just pack up and run, not bother with any of the song and dance. Not bother to try to be honest and vulnerable. Not be bothered by the idea of losing Arthur. And he is.

They’re both sitting at their campsite, Eames has been busying himself playing solitaire while Arthur reads. The light is dying, though, and they’re about to have to pack it in. He wins the latest match and shuffles the cards back together, putting them back in their pack as Arthur sighs and gives up, putting a bookmark in his book and stowing it away for later.

He expects Arthur will pull out some beers, maybe get some marshmallows again and they can go back to heckling each other over opinions on marshmallow doneness (Eames likes a perfect golden toast, even all around, while Arthur seems to think that _charred_ is somehow an acceptable state for consumption).

So before Arthur does any of that, and with no preamble, Eames says, “My parents never liked, nor wanted me.”

Arthur pauses, sits back in his chair and watches Eames.

“I made my peace with that a long time ago because I know it was inevitable,” Eames continues, “I spent long enough acting in every sort of way that I know there’s nothing I could have done to change it. They didn’t like me when I was quiet and obedient and they didn’t like me when I was loud and rebellious. They just genuinely never liked me and never would and never will.”

Arthur looks calm, patient. “Why did they have a child if they didn’t want one?” He asks it almost soothingly, not like he’s trying to patronize, but like he’s reverent of the trust the topic implies.

Eames shrugs. “Same reason they got married, it was what was expected. They didn’t like each other either. Tolerated, I suppose. But they had separate bedrooms and everything. Not that my father slept at home regularly anyway.”

“Where did he sleep?”

“In his not-so-secret secret flat with his mistresses.”

“So your nanny… she raised you, then?”

Eames nods. “Almost from birth. Well, I had a nanny from birth, but not the same one. I don’t remember the first one, mind, but when I was born I initially had a French one.”

“When you were born?”

Eames nods, blowing air hard his nose. Not quite a snort and certainly not a laugh, some kind of bitterly amused exhale. “Well, my mother certainly wasn’t going to do anything with an infant once the task was no longer biologically forced to be hers. I imagine the moment she found out she was pregnant she started looking to hire someone. I would bet good money that as soon as she pushed me out she told the nurses to handle whatever I needed and not to bother her unless they had some vicodin to give her.”

Arthur lets that sit a moment, then says, “So she hired a French nanny.”

“She had hopes to raise me up bilingual, very fashionable, you know. And it would look good for my schooling. Unfortunately, she found my father fucking the poor girl so that was that for her. Which, it wasn’t the cheating that was the real issue, you know. It was the nerve to do it in the house with staff. And not just staff, the _nanny_ of all people.” Eames affects an overly scandalized tone, “The impropriety! The scandal! Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to keep his women away from the estate?”

“And you know about this from?”

“Oh, a childhood of eavesdropping. Very good way to find out what’s happening.”

Arthur nods. “So… you and your nanny, you were close?”

Eames nods. “She loved me. I mean, I know she was… paid to raise me and she wouldn’t have been in my life were it not her livelihood, but… she did love me. Insomuch as… well, as one can love in that circumstance. But I think it’s natural, you know. If you’re an empathetic person, which she was, to form an emotional attachment to a child if you’re the one raising them. Even if you’re only doing it because you’re paid to.”

It’s a little bit hard to see the details of Arthur’s expression in the dark, but Eames forges on ahead. It almost feels like confession, and the hushed darkness surrounding them only serves to augment that feeling.

“I know I had a period when I was quite small where I was confused as to who my mother was exactly. I called my nanny ‘mummy’ and caused a whole upset.”

Arthur frowns. “Well, it’s not like they could be _surprised_ a baby would assume the woman who did all the caretaking was his mother.”

Eames laughs. “You’re applying logic to it. Don’t you know babies are supposed to act in accordance to rules and expectations? Very terrible and scandalous to step out of line, no matter the age.”

They both fall silent at that.

“You keep talking about her in the past tense,” Arthur says after a moment, “Your nanny.”

“Ah.”

“‘She was,’” Arthur quotes, but doesn’t ask. Eames isn’t sure if he’s trying to be sensitive by asking while not asking or not, but he has an answer.

“Let go once I reached an age no longer requiring her services,” he says, completing Arthur’s sentence. He carefully looks out into the surrounding woods, though there’s little to see, and keeps his voice steady. It’s an old hurt he’s practiced at keeping buried, but something about the frankness of the conversation has brought it back closer to the surface.

“Just like that?”

“A nanny was no longer necessary for a boy of my age.”

“But a mother was.”

“I still had one of those.”

“But she—”

“I know,” Eames cuts him off, “I know.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Arthur, I _know_. I _know_. Attachment theory and maternal roles and all of it. I know. I’m familiar with the concepts and with the… situation as it pertains to myself. I know.”

Arthur goes quiet, no longer trying to make whatever point he’d been trying for. Then he says, “But that doesn’t make it hurt any less, does it?”

The question pierces Eames and it’s unexpected. It doesn’t land like a blow, it’s too sharp for that, nor is it like a knife exactly, it doesn’t feel like an attack. Perhaps it’s foolish, but Eames finds himself almost blindsided by it, like an arrow maybe. Sharp and piercing and he somehow never saw it coming, or at least, didn’t see that it would land as it did. He takes a shuddering breath and Arthur comes to his side, pulling him up and to the tent.

He goes quietly and lets Arthur get them inside, get them undressed and tucked into bed.

He feels almost numb, but not. It’s odd and he doesn’t know how to describe it, but it has him reaching for Arthur, pressing up close and winding himself around him.

Arthur lets him, lets him start a kiss too. But Eames is desperate, desperate for something. For more.

He starts to push at Arthur’s shirt, trying to ruck it up so he can get his hands on the skin underneath, but he feels Arthur tense up a little and so he stops, dread starting to pool in his stomach. He isn’t trying to distract Arthur or manipulate him, that isn’t what he wants at all. He feels desperate and he hates that Arthur’s about to rebuff him for motives that aren’t even at play.

“I—I’m… I’m not trying to—it’s not—“

“I know,” Arthur says, shushing him.

“I just want—”

“Connection,” Arthur says, “Shh, I know.” Arthur moves to get on top of Eames, spreading his legs and settling between them, his whole body lined up along Eames’. He ducks down and kisses Eames again and Eames eagerly responds, folding his legs around Arthur’s hips and grasping at his back.

It doesn’t take long for their kissing and light groping to turn to frottage. Arthur stays on top of him, his hips rocking in time and his weight pressing Eames down into the earth. That more than anything grounds Eames. He wants Arthur to push harder, not to hurt, but to hold him tight and solid.

They’re both hard and while the angle isn’t the best, it’s good enough. Eames doesn’t want Arthur to move back to adjust, he doesn’t want to risk losing any of Arthur’s weight on him, his body pressed flush and eager.

To his mortification, Eames realizes he’s started tearing up and he breaks their kiss to gasp for breath. To try to settle himself a little, but it comes out hitched and shaky. A few tears slip down his cheeks and he clings to Arthur harder.

“I’ve got you,” Arthur soothes, “I’ve got you.”

Arthur leans up just enough to work both their cocks from their pants and takes them both in hand, rocking down on Eames in time as he strokes them. It’s messy and imperfect, but it’s so good. Eames can’t think of anything he wants more in the moment than being here in the middle of the woods, pressed down under Arthur’s body as he works them with his just this side of too dry hand.

It doesn’t take long before Eames comes and Arthur quickly scoops up his cum to slick his hand as he brings himself over the edge moments later.

The tent is a little stifling now, the air hot and close and their panting breath just as sultry. Eames pulls off his shirt and uses it to help haphazardly wipe them up, then collapses back into bed, hoping Arthur will follow instead of trying to figure out a more thorough washing technique.

He’s pleased that Arthur does and they curl together to sleep, neither of them speak another word, but Arthur does reach up to wipe the tears from Eames’ cheeks with his thumb before they settle down.

In the morning Eames wakes alone, but that’s okay because he can hear Arthur just outside. The tent is still slightly humid, with the trace scent of semen and sweat in the air. They’ll need to pull the outer shell off and let it air out through the mesh today.

He gets out of the tent to find Arthur already has coffee brewing and tea steeping and is busy setting up oatmeal packets to stand upright between rocks on the table. It’s a cooking technique Eames has grown familiar with, ripping open instant oatmeal packets and pouring hot water straight in. He expressed some scepticism when Arthur first did it, but Arthur insisted it was a classic camping breakfast and besides, he’d bought the type that had enough sugar and flavorings to make up for the fact that they were eating oat mush out of a paper pouch.

Eames has relented his assessment to ‘bearable’, but really he doesn’t mind too much. Even if he thinks they should do a modified camping fry-up more often than not.

Arthur looks up from his careful oatmeal balancing and he’s so perfectly outdoorsy and rumpled. His hair is a mess, out of order and curling slightly. He’s wearing his boots, but he hasn’t taken the time to really ready himself for the day, he usually waits until after his first cup of coffee for that. He’s got last night’s tshirt on still and there’s a smallest splattering of a cum stain at the bottom.

“I missed you,” Eames says.

The grin Arthur graces him with eases something in his chest.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who commented! It truly does mean the world.
> 
> Obviously with the pandemic, my own French Laundry trip has been postponed. But as that only came to be after I wrote Eames getting it, then if I write that Eames gets to go to Alinea as well, maybe my luck will hold and I will also be surprised with an Alinea reservation myself. Once we can go outside again, that is.

Now that sex is back on the table, Eames sees no issue in making himself available and making sure Arthur knows it. It’s a great plan that Arthur seems equally on board with, until he reveals that for all of his careful packing and preparation, he neglected to pack both lube and condoms.

“Should we drive to a shop?” Eames asks, trying to remember how far away they are from the nearest potential provider. Petrol station, perhaps.

“Is it that much of an emergency?”

“If _someone_ had thought to pack the necessary supplies we wouldn’t need to have this conversation at all.”

“I wasn’t thinking this was going to be the most… sex-filled outing.”

Eames raises his eyebrow. “You got me all alone in the woods with no one around to hear us and you had _no_ plans to take advantage of that?”

“Didn’t I tell you we aren’t reenacting _Brokeback Mountain_?”

“Yes, I recall. That involved no lube and no condoms, yes? Which is precisely the position you’ve put us in.”

Arthur rolls his eyes. “There’s still blowjobs. Besides, this really isn’t a great set up for penetration. The showers here leave… something to be desired.”

“Are you doubting my cleanliness?”

“I’m not doubting _you_ , I’m just saying.”

“Tell that to Montgomery.”

“Montgomery?

“He’s a frog acquaintance I made in the shower. He can attest to the state of my personal cleanliness.”

He expects Arthur to laugh, that’s what he was going for and usually what he’d get, but instead there’s silence. He looks over to see if Arthur really found him that unamusing, and is surprised to find Arthur standing there with an intensely heated look on his face.

“God, you’re gagging for it,” Arthur says, his voice carrying an edge that promises sweet, sweet rewards if Eames listens.

Eames straightens up a little in his seat, like he’s coming to attention. “And if I am?” His voice is still light and a little teasing, but clearly interested in the way things are going.

“Then get over here and we’ll see if we can put that mouth to better use.”

Eames stands and goes to him, too eager to play it cool and uninterested in keeping up a pretense. He expects Arthur to move towards the tent, both of them hurrying to get inside, but instead Arthur just stands there. He comes to a stop just before him and Arthur raises an eyebrow at him, cool and collected, before glancing down at the ground meaningfully.

Arthur wants him on his knees in the dirt right here in the open. It sends a throb of arousal through him, heat pulsing as he goes down to his knees. He glances up and sees approval in Arthur’s eyes, then reaches up to undo his jeans, but Arthur grabs him by the hair.

“No, not yet.”

Eames glances up at Arthur and Arthur watches him steadily. He loosens his grasp on Eames’ hair slightly, though he doesn’t fully let go and he pushes his hips forward just a little.

Eames gets the message and leans in, closing his eyes as he presses a kiss against the front of Arthur’s jeans. The denim is rough against his lips, and the material too thick for him to really use his mouth in a way that Arthur would be able to derive pleasure from, so instead of sucking and licking he keeps his mouth closed and just nuzzles his face against the bulge. Arthur isn’t fully hard, not yet, but he can feel his cock growing. He pushes his face harder against it, outlining where he can feel the shaft is resting. It isn’t until Arthur’s hard enough to strain against the fabric that he pulls Eames back by the hair and undoes his jeans, pushing them and his pants down just enough to get his cock out.

Arthur holds his cock by the base with one hand and the other he keeps in Eames’ hair. He angles it until the head pushes against Eames’ lips and Eames parts them eagerly, but instead of pushing inside, Arthur takes his time. He rubs the tip over Eames’ mouth, taps it against his lower lip a few times so Eames can feel the weight of it. It’s only once Eames shifts a little in his hold, darts his tongue out ever so slightly, that he actually pushes into his mouth.

Eames sucks eagerly, using his tongue on the outstroke and letting Arthur set the pace. He keeps it slow and steady for a while, giving Eames time to use a few tricks, show off his oral dexterity, then he asks, “You good for me to fuck your mouth?”

Eames tries to nod, but it’s hard with a cock in his mouth and Arthur still holding his hair to keep him in position, but he doesn’t want to push back to pull off.

“Tap my thigh once for yes, twice for no.”

Eames adjusts how he’s kneeling just a little, then taps his hand against Arthur’s thigh once.

Arthur smiles at him. “Good. Tap my thigh again if you need me to stop.” He tightens his grip on Eames’ hair and thrusts in hard.

He’s fucked Eames’ mouth plenty of times before. Eames’ talent at fully suppressing his gag reflex is an attractive novelty Arthur’s indulged in and Eames has been happy to supply. He’s been rough before too, but never quite like this. There’s this air of certainty and dominance that lays heavily over Arthur, there’s a roughness to his thrusts, not brutal, but assured and dancing on the edge of harsh. Like Eames’ mouth is only there for his pleasure and he’s helping himself, he’s taking exactly what he wants and that’s where all his focus lies.

It turns Eames on more than he can say. Kneeling here in the dirt, out in the open, his head anchored in place by Arthur’s sure hand as he thrusts in and out of Eames’ mouth. Eames closes his eyes and focuses on the feeling, the tiny pinpricks along his scalp where Arthur holds his hair, the heavy feeling of Arthur’s cock as it glides over his tongue, back into his throat. The slick sound of it, Arthur’s heavy breathing and occasional moan, all over a backdrop of birds chirping and wind rustling the leaves.

He can’t help but reach a hand down and palm himself through his own jeans, his cock hard and throbbing and pushing against the fabric confines it’s trapped in. He moans and Arthur responds in kind, his hips hitching a little on his thrust.

“ _Fuck_ you look good like that.”

That makes Eames open his eyes again and he looks up at Arthur, not moving his head, just cutting his eyes up. Arthur’s staring down at him, open mouthed and pupils blown.

“You take it so good,” Arthur’s voice is a little rough, a little deeper than normal.

Eames palms himself and moans around Arthur’s cock again and that does it, Arthur’s pushing into his mouth as far as he can go and holding Eames’ head tight, keeping him in place with a cock down his throat and his face pressed against Arthur’s belly. There’s no choice but to swallow, but Eames doesn’t mind, he focuses on staying relaxed until Arthur lets him go.

It takes just long enough that Eames is starting to flirt with oxygen deprivation, not enough to worry him, but enough that he can feel his body screaming for it. The moment Arthur lets him go and pulls out, Eames takes a desperate gasp of air, ragged and sweet.

Arthur’s hauling him to his feet before he has a chance to fully recover and steering him into the tent. He goes eagerly and they both fumble over each other in their haste. They don’t quite make it all the way in the tent before Eames is on all fours with Arthur draped over his back. Their feet are still sticking out the flap, but Arthur’s hand groping over his crotch makes that a minor detail that Eames has no concern for.

He braces himself with his palms flat and arches under Arthur, thrusting into Arthur’s hand that’s busy cupping and rubbing at him. He’d prefer not to come in his pants, but he’s too worked up to stop moving into the stimulation. He hears Arthur panting in his ear and it sends a shiver running down his spine.

Arthur brings his other hand around and blindly fumbles with Eames’ flies until he gets inside, but quickly gets fed up with the lack of mobility for his hand and reaches to the fabric on Eames’ hips and roughly tugs both his jeans and pants down until they bunch around his thighs. It traps Eames in place even more, but at least his cock’s out and Arthur can stroke him properly.

Arthur’s still tight against his back, his breath on Eames’ neck as he strokes him. Eames thrusts into his hand, bracing both their weight on his hands and knees and tilting his head back to give Arthur better access to kiss or bite, if he wants.

“Fuck,” Eames gasps, “Arthur, more.”

Arthur does push up a little, but instead of going for Eames’ neck he turns his mouth to Eames’ ear and says, “I’d offer to eat you out, but…”

“You’ve been mentioning that quite a bit for a man who has yet to provide,” Eames says, still thrusting into Arthur’s hand.

“The second we get back to a city and you get cleaned up—and don’t even argue with me about what you’ve been doing in the showers here—I’m going to lay you out and eat you out until you’re _sobbing_ from it.” Arthur tightens his grip, stroking a bit faster.

It takes Eames a moment before he can speak. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he pants out.

Suddenly Arthur’s hand is gone and his weight disappears off Eames’ back. Before he can think to complain, Arthur’s hand comes down in a decisive slap against his bare arse. He moans and tilts his hips up, and is rewarded with another swat. Arthur isn’t hitting too hard, but it’s purposeful. It’s sharp enough to be felt, but the sting fades fast, leaving behind a slight tingle that has Eames wanting to squirm.

Arthur spanks him one last time, then grabs him by the hips and flips him over. Eames tries to spread his legs so Arthur can settle between them, but his jeans still around his thighs constrict the movement. He thinks of asking Arthur to help him get them down, but before he’s formulated his request, Arthur speaks.

“You need something in you that bad? Here,” he says, pressing two of his fingers into Eames’ mouth.

Eames would like to be indignant and protest, but Arthur knows him too well. There’s no use bothering with the pretense when it’s something they both know he wants.

“Suck,” Arthur says, his voice low and rough.

Eames hollows his cheeks, sucking and curling his tongue along Arthur’s fingers. Arthur watches him, his lips slightly parted and his face flushed. It makes Eames all the more eager to put on a show, but he can’t move much, trapped as he is. Flat on his back under Arthur with his clothes tangled up and holding him down. He watches Arthur’s eyes trace over his lips, where they’re pursed and wet and tight around Arthur’s fingers.

Arthur pushes his fingers a little further into Eames’ mouth, curling them down to press on his tongue, then spreading them in a v. Eames sucks dutifully as he does this, and teases his tongue along each finger individually once they’re parted. Arthur looks up from his mouth then, catching his eye and the heat in his gaze redoubles Eames’ desire to move. He bucks his hips up slightly and Arthur pulls his fingers from his mouth in response.

Eames would protest except Arthur takes his hand and drops it to Eames’ cock. It’s a slightly odd sensation, two fingers slick and the rest of his hand dry, but his hand is tight and sure and the hold of it feels so good. Eames is thrusting up blindly, moaning and it takes a moment for him to realize he’d closed his eyes on instinct, but he doesn’t bother to reopen them. He’s too focused on the narrowing sensation as he gets closer, chasing it as all his effort goes into fucking Arthur’s hand.

He comes like that and goes limp there on the floor of the tent. Arthur’s tucked up along his side and both of them look ridiculous, their clothes on, but their cocks out. Their feet sticking out the still open tent flap. Their eyes meet again and Eames finds Arthur wearing a dopey grin to match his own. He laughs and Arthur leans in to kiss him anyway, sharing breath and satisfied but sloppy kisses broken with smiles.

“I think I’d like to discuss things more,” Eames says. It’s been on his mind since their conversation about his parents, about Aoife. Arthur still isn’t pushing and in the absence of that Eames’ mind has continued to turn things over, musing and prodding and ultimately unsatisfied with doing it on his own.

“Things?”

“My identity.”

Arthur nods. “Okay.”

Now that Eames has gotten this far, he’d thought more would come naturally, but he finds himself starting and stopping sentences in his head. He can’t figure out where to begin, what exactly to say.

Arthur watches him for a bit, then asks, “Is there a way that might be easier for you to talk?”

“Ask me a question.”

“Okay. Uh, when’s the last time you felt… solid in your identity?”

“I don’t know.”

“So it started when you were a kid?”

Eames nods.

“You acted then?”

Eames nods again.

“So when you were a kid, was it you being you, but acting differently, or was it creating new _identities?_ ”

“Oh,” Eames says, “Well… the acting came first, but it didn’t take long for all the rest. I was still a child when I gave myself my first new identity.”

Arthur’s obviously intrigued by that, but he’s polite enough not to press.

Eames smiles wryly. “Oilibhéar. Oilibhéar Quinn. He was Irish. I was ah… I suppose six or so, something around there.”

“And it wasn’t just playacting?”

Eames shakes his head. “No, no I did research. Well, as much research as a small child can do. But I was fully preparing myself to be him. I practiced the accent and everything. My plan at that point was to become Oilibhéar and remain him for the rest of my life. Though I will say in personality I don’t think he was that much different than the… me I was at that point. It was more about the name and nationality and… parents and such. He had a different background, a different life.”

“What was his background like?”

“My nanny was his mother. That was… key. He was ready to go home with her, get away from the family that was employing her. He didn’t like them very much.”

“Did you tell her about him?”

Eames nods. “I made a whole case for how she should quit her job and take me back to Ireland with her and that I would be perfect for her, I’d be the perfect son if she’d just take me…” He trails off, there’s a lump in the back of his throat as he remembers how much he’d begged and cried and pleaded, bargaining and promising anything he could think of if she’d just take him away.

“I’m sorry.”

Eames shrugs. “It was a foolish child’s hope. She couldn’t have done it even if she’d wanted to.”

“Still.”

Eames shrugs again. “From there it was just more experimenting. Acting, names, behaviour, identities… it was just how I was, what I was.”

Arthur nods. “And then came forgery…”

A slow grin crosses Eames’ lips. “And then came forgery,” he repeats softly, an edge of vicious satisfaction to his voice, “And the entire world opened up.”

Arthur watches him. “It’s more than a job.” 

It’s not a question, but Eames hears it for the prompt it is. He nods. “I can act here, in this body, and I have been my whole life. But I am tied to this physicality,” he says, sweeping a hand to gesture to himself, “And not all identities fit. But in a dream? I can make my body match with _anyone_. Anyone I want to be, anyone someone else wants me to be. Hell, someone they _don’t_ want me to be, I can do it all.”

“What if you didn’t have to act?”

Eames feels the looming trepidation of that line of questioning. He thought they’d been through this already, gone over it time and time again, and yet Arthur still never quite seemed to understand. “Arthur,” he says, a little cautiously. Trying to weigh out a response on his tongue that won’t lead to another fight. Things have been going so well and he doesn’t want to lose that.

“I’m not trying to fix you,” Arthur says.

Eames nods, still a little wary, waiting to see what Arthur says.

“I just meant… do you act because you _want_ to or because you _have_ to?”

Eames blinks, thinking that over. It’s a more complicated question that it seems on the surface. He has to, surely, he shudders to think of the blank slate he’d be without acting. He’s not sure a fragmented person like that would be capable of much anything. Acting is a necessity. But there is desire as well, he knows. Forgery is a delicate and skilled craft and one he prides himself in, enjoys. It’s inherent to him for survival, but he’s taken it and turned it into art. Both halves, the need and the want loop back on each other and intermingle. “I…” He says after a moment, “Both, I suppose.”

Arthur nods, seemingly satisfied with that.

“So… Eames.”

“Yes?” It seems an odd lead in to another question, but Eames doesn’t mind.

“No, I mean. Eames, you made him.”

“Yes.”

“So you named him…”

Eames gives him a slow amused smirk.

“Why Eames? I’m assuming your parents didn’t name you that and you decided it was time to use it again.”

Eames laughs, “No, Eames is of my own invention.” He sits back a little in his chair. “It has a certain… well, there’s a familiarity there. It’s a name you hear and it sparks in your mind that you may have heard it before, even if you aren’t particularly familiar with the designers or the chair. It has a specific sort of class to it that fit what I was trying to create, but it doesn’t have the weight of a lineage to tie it down. It’s memorable without crossing the line of too ostentatious.”

“You put a lot of thought in.”

Eames frowns slightly. “Of course I do. No one will believe in sloppy work. Even if you can’t point to precisely what’s wrong, you’ll feel it if something doesn’t ring true. The point is to be believed, to live it authentically. That doesn’t happen without work.”

Arthur shakes his head. “I didn’t mean—I wasn’t trying to insult you. I just meant… I guess I never really thought about how much work it is. I know what you do on a job, but to do it all the time…” He trails off a moment. “Doesn’t it get tiring?”

Eames shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s not quite as active as you seem to think. I mean, the initial creation is. But once I’ve created the person it’s just… stepping in. Becoming. After a while you just know what to do, what to say. I’m familiar enough with Eames to know intuitively how he’d react, I don’t have to waste time thinking about every little thing.”

Arthur’s frowning a little now, but it’s a contemplative frown as he listens. Eames thinks he’s sitting there trying to imagine being Eames, acting until he can be someone else. Eames thinks that probably sounds as difficult to him as Arthur’s work sounds to Eames. They both do things that come naturally to them, and their types of intuition are two different sorts that drive very different skills.

“What was your name, if you don’t mind me asking?” Arthur asks, a little hesitantly. Like he thinks he’s asking for a little too much and is about to be shot down, but he won’t begrudge a no. Like it’s a risk he expects to not pan out, but can’t help but try.

Eames tries to remember the last person who knew his birth name. It must’ve been his family, Aoife. Maybe one of his early connections after he left home. He did of course change his name when he left, but those were the early days. He wasn’t quite as good at burying the paper trail back then so someone may have been able to piece some things together.

He’s gotten better since then, much better. Even Arthur, for all his research prowess and ability to unearth things he really shouldn’t have been able to get his hands on, has no idea. Eames has laid down so many false leads and trails that loop and backtrack and cover each other. Burned identities that lead to other burned identities, multiple false backgrounds hiding each other. An endless maze of misinformation. He’s a little curious to know how far Arthur’s ever mapped it out, how many people he made it through before he gave up, realizing Eames was a ghost.

He thinks about what it might mean to tell Arthur now. The power of a name.

And names are powerful.

Names are identity. Are myth and legend and story. They’re community and communication. They’re belonging and ostracizing. They’re tells and they’re secrets. They can withhold as much as they can reveal. Open and close doors. They have a meaning and a power near hallowed. There is a reason the fae tend to bind with a name.

Arthur’s starting to look more regretful as he waits for an answer, like he’s second-guessing and wondering if he truly crossed a line. Eames wonders if he realizes the nature of the hesitance has less to do with concerns about the name itself. The types of things a man like Arthur might do with a name, the research, the discovery of past. And rather, much more to do with the mythic power of names. The revealing not of historic events, but of the nature of the person present for them.

He wonders what it will mean to tell Arthur his name, but he thinks that will only reveal itself in the telling. He’s enough of a gambler to face that risk and wait to see how it lands.

“Oliver,” he says.

“Oliver,” Arthur repeats, thoughtfully. He says it like he’s testing how it feels in his mouth.

Eames likes the sound of it better than anyone else who ever called him that. He nods. “That’s what my parents named me.”

Arthur looks better at ease now, something calculating, but not cold crosses his face. “Then what did the people you care about call you?”

Eames smiles. Arthur’s clever, to know to ask that. To know that Oliver was the formal name only used by his parents. To know that meant there was something else he was called, something more intimate, more important. A name within a name, more powerful than the first. It feels like a gamble paid off to reward Arthur with it.

“Ollie,” Eames says.

Arthur smiles. “Ollie.”

Eames likes how that sounds even better.

They don’t stay in the woods much longer. Camping has been fun, but they’ve both been there long enough that they’re feeling ready to leave. Eames doesn’t want to push Arthur into going before he’s ready so he doesn’t say anything, but Arthur suggests they go soon after Eames starts feeling the itch to leave.

They pack up and hit the road and Eames wonders what comes next. Are they going back to Cobb’s? Splitting off again? He thinks that will feel incomplete, he’d hoped they’d continue on together, though the ultimate destination eludes him even as he imagines it. Some undetermined endless holiday.

“How do you feel about Chicago?” Arthur asks. They’re on the road, Arthur driving and Eames trying to decide whether to invent a topic for conversation, or change the music.

Eames smiles. “Shall we pose together at The Bean?” And that’s answer enough for Arthur to book their trip on his phone the next time he pulls over to refuel the Jeep.

Chicago feels loud and bustling after so long in the quiet isolation of the woods, but rather than grating, Eames finds it energizing. They get a room in a fancy hotel and both luxuriate in the amenities provided, the return to civilization. They both shave and get cleaned up and sleep in the first day, the bed a more than welcome respite from their tent—no matter how nicely Arthur had fixed it up.

Arthur begs off on some mysterious errand so Eames decides to spend his day indulging to an extent that nears absurd. He lounges in bed a while, then orders wine and bonbons through room service and draws himself a bath with all sorts of oils and salts. He sets his phone on the counter to play big band classics and while the sound is slightly tinny, the acoustics of the bathroom make up for it. The bathtub is wide and deep and he settles in with a towel rolled behind his neck, resting his hands up and out of the water, one holding his wine glass and the other for fetching bonbons from the plate he set up.

That’s exactly how Arthur finds him upon his return. Eames can tell it’s him in the doorway and doesn’t bother to open his eyes. There’s an ease of familiarity there.

“You look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

“I am.” Eames opens his eyes and turns his head slightly to look at Arthur, who is leaning in the doorway, watching him. “Bonbon?” Eames offers, gesturing loosely to the plate.

“Maybe in a minute,” Arthur says, “I got us a reservation at Alinea.”

“Oh _darling_ ,” Eames breathes out, “They have three—”

“Michelin Stars. I know, you snob.”

“Arthur, darling, they have edible _balloons_.”

“Which sounds more like a child’s county fair treat than fine dining, but I guess I’m not as cultured as you.”

“They paint dessert on the tables,” Eames says with a sense of wonderment.

“Which also sounds like something children would do.”

Eames starts to frown. “If you don’t want to go…”

Arthur shakes his head. “I want to take you, I was just teasing. I just don’t go in for the whole… conceptualism thing with food. But I wouldn’t have pulled strings to get a table if I didn’t want to take you.”

“Come over here and I’ll suck your cock.”

Arthur laughs. “So going out to get you into the fancy theater food restaurant is worth a blowjob, but not worth getting out of the bath?” He’s walking over to the bathtub anyway.

Eames sits up in the bath and holds his glass up to Arthur. “You may finish my wine as well.”

“Oh, generous.” Arthur does take the glass and sips from it. “There’s something else I’d like, though.”

“Oh?”

“I believe there was a promise made, once we were back in a city and you were cleaned up.”

“ _Oh_.”

“So,” Arthur has another sip of wine, “Would you be willing to get out of the bathtub for that?”

“I believe I may.”

“So dry off and get on the bed,” Arthur says cheerfully, reaching down to pop a bonbon in his mouth and walking out of the bathroom.

Eames does and Arthur makes good on his teasing words, to eat him out until he’s sobbing from it. It’s just as luxurious as everything else, spreading out on the bed and Arthur teasing at him with his lips and tongue, small touches at first until Eames is shoving his hips back and Arthur grabs hold of him to lick in earnest. He holds Eames in place and alternates from feather light little teases across the rim and then firm long strokes of his tongue.

He doesn’t let up until Eames is squirming at every touch, hard and responsive and desperate for more. Eames isn’t sure how long it goes on, just that it has him dancing on a razor’s edge of devastatingly good, but not quite enough. He thinks Arthur’s tongue must surely be aching by now, but Arthur presses on anyway.

“God, Arthur, fuck me, please,” Eames eventually gasps out and it’s only then that Arthur pulls back. He pushes two fingers to Eames’ hole, still slick from his mouth and pets at it, teasing instead of dipping inside.

Eames whimpers and tries to shove back, anything as long as he gets _more_ , but Arthur anticipates that and moves with him so he can’t get it.

“ _Arthur_ ,” Eames says, more whine than he’d like, but it’s getting ridiculous now, how long Arthur’s had him on edge and held him there.

“You want my cock?”

“Yes.”

Arthur pulls back, which Eames hates, but he knows Arthur needs to get the lube in order to fuck him so he doesn’t say anything. Not until he feels Arthur’s weight leaving the bed. He rolls over to see what’s happening, frowning as he sees Arthur’s all the way off the bed. “What—”

“Brushing my teeth, I’ll be right back.” Arthur doesn’t even spare him a glance as he hurries to the bathroom.

Eames hears the sink and decides to hell with whatever timetable Arthur’s working on, he’s going to get ready. He grabs the lube and slicks his fingers, making quick work of getting them inside and it’s good, but it isn’t quite what he wants. He pushes a third finger in and surely Arthur should be returning soon? What the hell is he doing in there, an amateur dental procedure? He decides if Arthur takes much longer he might just get himself off and go to sleep to teach him a lesson about punctuality. Certainly a role reversal, but Eames doesn’t have the mind to ponder the irony at the moment.

He spreads his legs so he can get his arm at a better angle and curls his fingers until he finds his prostate, starting to finger himself in earnest. He’s got his lower lip held between his teeth, which is doing little to stifle his noises, but he feels drawn tense like a wire and uncaring of his appearance.

His eyes are closed and while he feels the bed shift as Arthur returns, he’s too focused on rolling his hips in time with his fingers to bother looking at him.

“Needy,” Arthur says, tugging Eames’ hand out of his way and replacing it with his cock. It’s only then that Eames opens his eyes, a whine of loss caught in his throat as it turns to a moan as Arthur finally, blessedly, sinks in. Eames isn’t sure exactly when he got a condom on, maybe during his incredibly long bathroom sojourn, but he’s glad for the preparedness.

“I swear to God,” Eames says, wrapping his legs around Arthur’s waist and grabbing hold of his back, “If you don’t fuck me right now I’m going to steal the ink cartridges from all your pens before your next job.”

Arthur makes a ridiculous half laugh, half moan noise as he starts to thrust. “Lots of complaints from a guy who just got his ass eaten until he was _begging_ for it.”

Eames reaches one arm down and manages a smack across Arthur’s arse. It isn’t as well executed as he’d like, but it’s enough to have Arthur’s hips stuttering as he gasps in surprise. It also serves to goad Arthur into adjusting his position a little, giving himself better leverage, and then using that to start going at Eames hard and fast and really, that’s what Eames was going for so he counts it as a win.

He doesn’t last long with Arthur going at him like that. With how on edge he was before and how well Arthur’s fucking him now, he only manages a few strokes of his own cock before he comes. He clenches around Arthur as he crests the edge and when he comes down he can feel a slight tremble in his thighs, the muscles involuntarily tensing and releasing.

“Oh fuck,” Arthur pants, “Oh fuck, baby, can I…?” He’s still rocking his hips, not quite as hard now, but still fucking Eames in even strokes.

Eames would like to say yes, let Arthur keep going until he comes too, but now that he’s come he’s starting to feel it threaten to turn quickly into overstimulation.

“Sorry,” he says, a little breathless and very regretful. He can feel in the tension of Arthur’s body how close he is.

Arthur shakes his head and pulls out. “S’fine,” he says, reaching down and pulling off the condom with very little regard for anything other than getting his hand on his cock.

“Here.” Eames twists and fumbles around for the lube, not quite sure where it’s gotten off to, but manages to find it in the bed without too much trouble. He pops the cap and does a less than coordinated job squirting some on his thighs, he knows he’s soaking the bed too, but it’s worth it to watch Arthur’s eyes light up as he realizes what Eames is doing.

Eames rolls over and clenches his thighs together. He’d much prefer to be lax and loose right now, enjoying the afterglow, but even more than that he’d like to make sure Arthur gets off too and he doesn’t feel coordinated enough to offer a handjob.

Arthur’s on him the moment he’s in position, shoving his cock between Eames’ thighs and grabbing him by the hips. He tucks his face against Eames’ neck, leaving haphazard kisses as he thrusts hard and fast. It doesn’t take too long once he gets going, able to chase a pace solely for himself, without needing to worry about Eames. He comes with a groan, then collapses on Eames.

They’re a sticky mess, tangled up in each other and unwilling to move.

Though, once he’s had a moment to rest, Eames says, “Shove over, I’m in the wet spot.”

“So am I,” Arthur says, “There’s lube everywhere.”

Eames hums. “Well. Given the… magnitude, I suppose we’d better leave quite a tip for whatever poor maid has to deal with it.”

“Oh _God_ ,” Arthur groans, “That’s awful. You’re awful.”

“I’m pragmatic. Besides I didn’t hear you complaining as we made the mess.”

“ _We’re_ awful,” Arthur amends, “We’re leaving the biggest tip that maid has ever seen.”

Eames laughs. “I do so love how you take care of things. Wining and dining me, flashing money to make our problems disappear.”

“Regular gold-digger, huh?”

Eames flutters his eyelashes. “Would you like to be my sugar daddy?”

Arthur rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling.

It’s nice, everything about Chicago is nice. The room, the mood, the food. It’s heartening to feel that they’ve come this far. That they aren’t falling into the same traps as they did in Vegas.

Alinea is everything Eames had hoped it would be, the quality of the food, the theatricality. It’s inherently playful, and while he recognizes some of the ‘all is not as it appears’ presentation is somewhat trite, it’s handled deftly enough to still be appealing. Besides, the triteness must be appreciated in the context of Alinea as a foundation for many of the concepts that others took and ran with. He tells Arthur about this, and his personal analysis of the blend of food as sustenance with food as performance art.

Arthur’s a good enough date to nod along, ask pertinent questions, and offer some of his perspective, for all that he’s a self-admitted skeptic of food as performance. It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy food, but he’s a man who knows himself and knows that what he seeks isn’t the same as what Eames does. But he’s willing to entertain and indulge Eames all the same.

They leave hand in hand and Eames assures Arthur that their next outing can be to whatever renowned ancient neighborhood dive Arthur wants. The promise makes Arthur laugh, but Eames knows there’s truth there.

They go to The Wiener's Circle, which is exactly the sort of greasy little late night spot Eames would expect. He loves that about Arthur, that for all his appearance of snobbery he has such a fondness for little diners and the like. It’s charming and it’s real, which makes it all the more alluring.

Besides, Eames likes them too, particularly for observing people.

The woman behind the counter treats customers with a smile and a barrage of foul-mouthed insults. It’s unexpected, particularly for customer service, but as the targets of her barbs laugh, Eames realizes that’s the language of this place. It’s delightful. He can’t wait to hear how she rakes him and Arthur over the coals, what observations she builds on.

Arthur’s grinning knowingly beside him, surely expecting Eames to enjoy the spectacle of it.

“A different kind of theatre, then?” Eames asks, bumping their shoulders together.

Arthur nods. “Sure.”

“Was this just for me?”

“No, I love this place. But… I did think you’d appreciate it too.”

And he does. He appreciates the quick-witted craft of the employees, how they have to observe each customer and weigh out whether they’re someone receptive to this form of communication. To have an eye for details and know how to use them as fodder for an insult. To toe the line that keeps it light enough for a laugh.

It’s his favourite restaurant Arthur takes him to, he thinks. Alinea is special, certainly, and he loves it. But late night Arthur, licking up sauce from his fingers from the too many toppings he’s got on his hot dog, a little out of place in his chinos sitting on this bench in the middle of Chicago, still laughing from a well placed insult from the woman inside, that’s an image Eames holds most dear.

He’s a little desperate to keep Arthur he realizes, now that he has him. He’s been being careful to not upset Arthur, he knew that. He knew he was trying to be better this time, to be mindful of how he fucked up in Vegas, and even before that. It’s not exactly a surprise, and yet it does take him aback, just a little.

In revealing himself to Arthur, he’s also been cementing Arthur’s place. He wants him, wants to keep him. Wants to please him and ensure he doesn’t leave. It’s a mindframe unfamiliar to Eames. Not… him. But Eames. Eames, the man he created. Eames the role he’s worn for so long. It’s more familiar to others he’s been, other versions of himself.

The instinct to run has itself, all but fled. He knows that was something he cultivated later in life, the running. Eames in particular is a man partial to leaving before the other shoe drops. Or, at times, forcing the shoe to drop and then getting out before having to face the full extent of the aftermath.

But Ollie? Ollie was never a runner. Ollie always tried bargaining and pleading and pleasing first. He had learned it didn’t work, no one stays no matter how sweetly you twist yourself round for them, but it was always his gut response anyway.

It’s been decades since Ollie was at the fore of any decisions, indeed, Eames had been fairly certain he’d killed Ollie off fully years ago. Buried him deep in an unmarked grave with the knowledge that no one would bother to mourn him.

He was just a little too vulnerable for a life on the run, but at the same time Eames knows it was Ollie who first learned the value of acting. Of lying. Of manipulating and twisting and all those skills that laid the foundation for everything and everyone who came after. It was Ollie who endured the first experiments and Ollie who tried so hard, but never managed to put himself back together.

Ollie who was born fractured, like Humpty Dumpty already shattered to pieces. And Ollie, who for all his family name and fortune never had all the king’s men trying to put him back together again. He just had craft glue and paint and stories and his own trembling hands that never could piece the puzzle into place.

He wonders if his own memory has been a little unkind to Ollie. Used him as a scapegoat for why things never worked out. The conviction that if Ollie had only been tougher, smarter, more hardened. If Ollie had just been better, had made himself someone _better_. Then maybe.

But like it or not, he’s opened that box again and found that it wasn’t the casket he thought it was. Ollie isn’t dead, instead he’s let Ollie out. Let Arthur know him and name him and maybe, just maybe this time he can form him into someone the right way.

Eames is intuitive, he’s always been intuitive. He picked up on things as a child, he knew things he wasn’t supposed to know. He read people and tried to reflect them back to themselves, or project whatever it was they wanted to see in others.

It’s served him well in dreamshare, forgery always felt natural. There’s a reason he has the reputation he does, he has the skills to back it up. A lifetime of practice.

But with Arthur, now, relying on naught but his intuition feels a little too risky. Arthur isn’t as intuitive, at least, not about people, not the same way. But Arthur is focused, watchful. He takes in information and files it away, analyzes it. He watches details and he makes plans based on the data he gathers.

If Eames isn’t careful, he may cross an invisible line. Arthur has many trip wires and while Eames is good, he knows he’s tripped them in the past. He can’t be too accommodating without rousing suspicion, he can’t be too contrary without being unpleasant. He can’t be too calculating or Arthur will suspect he’s being had.

It’s a complicated high wire balancing act and now that running is off the table, now that he knows he wants to convince Arthur to stay, he finds himself back in Ollie’s old playbook. Please, plead, bargain, convince. Be whoever you must in order to accomplish this. If you do, if they stay, that means you finally became someone worth it.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all dearly for the comments! Truly brightens my day every time!
> 
> A chapter that could be called, “Eames Demonstrates How One Can Overcorrect When Attempting to Course-Correct”.

After Chicago comes New York City. Eames had a brief flash of trepidation as he remembered Jimmy, but he cast it aside quickly. Arthur’s New York isn’t Jimmy’s New York and there’s no reason to revisit any of that. Jimmy’s long gone and the entire point of this venture now is to go places Arthur wants. So if Arthur wants New York, then New York it is.

It goes much the same as the other parts of their trip, a fancy hotel, some fine dining for Eames, a few dives for Arthur. Though, they do also go to a few classy French bistros for the both of them, brunch at Balthazar is certainly a highlight of their time there.

Eames continues to do his best to straddle the line of pleasing without being so overly accommodating that Arthur rankles in the face of it. He does at times feel like perhaps he isn’t quite Eames at all, perhaps when he said Ollie’s name in the woods that was enough to conjure him back into control and Eames has been slipping away ever since. That may be the case, but he isn’t quite sure. It may not be the worst thing, either. Arthur seems fairly content with the Eames-Ollie hybrid that exists in New York.

They take the time to go out more in New York. Museums and galleries, long walks exploring each of the boroughs and popping into whatever shops and cafes catch their eye. It’s nice, it’s relaxing in a different way from their other stops.

Though, that’s not to say relaxation is their only goal.

“Let’s go out tonight,” Arthur says.

“Where?” Eames is sprawled across the bed on his back, holding up a little paperback in one hand and reading. His arm will get tired soon and he’ll move, but for now he’s comfortable.

“A club,” Arthur says, looking at something on his phone.

“You want to go clubbing?” Eames turns over on the bed so he’s on his stomach, setting his book aside and watching Arthur. “Darling, are you researching clubs?”

The tips of Arthur’s ears turn red. “Shut up, I want to go somewhere good.”

“What quantifies ‘good’ in your equation? Some people consider trashy to be the highest achievement of a club.”

“Not trashy, but not… too classy. Fun, but not full of kids on their first big night out.”

“Exacting standards, I’d expect nothing less. Shall I put on glitter and a mesh shirt for you?”

“Not that kind of club.”

“No?”

Arthur looks up at him. “Alright, maybe a little that kind of club, but no glitter for us. I don’t want to be picking glitter off myself for the next week.”

“So you’re envisioning more of the indecently tight trousers and vests sort of thing, then?”

Arthur looks him over and nods.

Eames grins. “I can work with that. Let me just pop out to get something suitable while you research the perfect venue.” He gets up and slips some shoes on, then drops a kiss to the crown of Arthur’s head. “I shan’t be gone long.”

The shopping trip brings back echoes of Jimmy yet again, the man seems determined to cast his shadow over New York, but Eames sets him aside. Jimmy’s taste was younger and flashy in a different way from what he’s looking for. He finds suitably tight jeans, the denim clinging to his arse quite appealingly, but with a stretch knit so they aren’t too stiff. He also finds a few different shirt options from vests to a few patterned short sleeve button downs that he thinks would look good tucked in and only halfway buttoned up. He buys them all and figures Arthur will let him know what fits the dress code of whatever club he’s picked.

Arthur’s already ordered room service for them both by the time he comes back and is awaiting its arrival.

“Find anything good?”

Eames nods, setting his shopping aside. “Few options so there should be something suitable for whichever club you pick.”

Dinner is a quick and easy affair, followed by a miniature fashion show as they start getting ready.

“What are you wearing?” Eames calls out to Arthur, who’s in the bathroom putting finishing touches on his hair.

“Jeans and an undershirt,” Arthur replies.

Eames nods to himself and pulls on a different shirt, one of the patterned button ups. He buttons it up and tucks it into his jeans, then unbuttons it down to his stomach, pulling the fabric a little so there’s some give, some space to move. He appraises himself in the full length mirror outside the bathroom and finds he rather likes it. It’s suggestive without being a mesh shirt cliche and the short sleeves of the shirt are tight across his biceps in a very appealing way.

He hears Arthur walking out of the bathroom and turns to face him, spreading his arms. “Hm?”

Arthur looks him up and down. “Hot in a vaguely _Miami Vice_ kind of way.”

“These trousers are too tight for _Miami Vice_.” He looks himself over in the mirror again. “So I should’ve gotten sunglasses?”

“I said ‘vaguely’,” Arthur says, moving past him to fetch his own jeans, “And yeah, that’s exactly what I want. Hand-in-hand with the sunglasses in the club douchebag.”

Arthur’s jeans are tight and slim cut, showing off his legs. His undershirt is thin and clingy, semi-opaque white that gives just the barest hint of the flesh underneath. “Ready?”

“Give me a moment.” Eames steps into the bathroom to style his hair and as he does it he remembers Mexico. Remembers doing his hair while Arthur waited, but also remembers Arthur mentioning a fantasy. Him, slick and ready and fucking him in a club. He grins at his own reflection and finds a bottle of lube they have stashed in the bathroom. He makes as quick work of the prep as he can and then sets his clothes to rights, shoving a condom in his pocket.

“Ready,” he says as he steps out of the bathroom to meet Arthur, who’s watching him with a raised eyebrow.

The club is a near perfect encapsulation of what Arthur said he wanted. It’s fun and maybe a little trashy, but in a more sophisticated way. There’s no pretentiousness, but there is a slightly more grown-up feeling than might be found in the clubs Eames frequented the last time he was in New York.

The music is loud and people are packed in tight on the dance floor. The bar is full, busy, but it’s not impossible to get a drink. There are a few house specialities on offer in addition to all the makings of most any cocktail you’d want and the two of them decide to settle in at the bar first, order a few drinks and get a lay of the land.

Arthur’s tucked up along his side as they sip their respective drinks and look out over the dance floor.

“Did you want to dance, or are you in a more voyeuristic mood?”

Arthur knocks back his drink. “Dance after my next.” He waves down the bartender and gets them another round and true to his word as soon as they’re done he takes Eames by the hand and approaches the dance floor. He’s strategic about it though, he seems to have scoped out exactly which spot he wants to be in and isn’t shy about elbowing his way to it.

Eames grins and follows along, muscling his way through the crowd as Arthur leads him where he wants.

They settle in, pressed close together and surrounded by the crowd, everyone bumping up against each other. The thrumming of the music is a physical sensation that pulses through them and guides their movements as they press even closer. Eames has Arthur by the hips and keeps himself plastered along his back, rocking and grinding to the beat while Arthur moves against him.

One song blends into the next like this, they take breaks for drinks and then return to the floor. Eames would be lying if he said he wasn’t half-hard and he knows Arthur can feel it, is pressing his arse back against Eames to tease him.

“Want to get out of here?” He asks into Arthur’s ear.

Arthur twists a little in his hold, tilting his head so Eames can hear him clearer. “Already?”

Eames pulls him tighter to his body and tugs at his earlobe gently with his teeth. “Remember Mexico?” He feels Arthur nod. “Remember what you said about taking me to a club?” It takes a moment, but then he feels Arthur stiffen a little in his arms before turning around to face him.

“Really?”

Eames nods.

Arthur drops his hands down to cup Eames’ arse. “You’re—“

Eames grins and leans in. “Ready for you.” He kisses Arthur, deep and filthy, then pulls away with a wink. “I’m going to get another drink. Then you should come and find me.”

He orders another drink and sips it as he surveys the bar, trying to figure out which of the bathrooms looks least trafficked. Maybe this isn’t the right club for this and they should move on to somewhere that’s a little more of a dive, but they can at least kiss and feel each other up before they decide that.

There’s a gentle tap against his arm and he looks over to see a drink lined up and waiting. The bartender gives him a wink and points out a guy eyeing him up from the other side of the bar. Eames grins and downs it, no sense turning down a free drink, even if he’s not available to follow up on the offer it symbolizes.

He sees the guy sidling up to him and leans back a little.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Eames replies.

“I’m Brian.”

“I’m not here alone, Brian, but thanks for the drink.”

Brian’s hopeful expression drops. “Oh.”

“Sorry, love. But I really couldn’t turn down a free drink anyway, could I?”

Brian smiles and it looks a little bashful. “Guess not.”

He’s really rather pretty and seems fairly sweet and Eames is in a good enough mood that he feels a little bad to turn him down so cold, but he has nothing on Arthur. Still, doesn’t mean Eames has to leave him alone and shut down at the bar.

“Here,” he says leaning in a little, “I’m guessing I’m your type, yeah? Let’s find you someone to pull.” He straightens up and looks around before clocking a guy with a similar body type to his own who appears to be alone. “How about him?” He tilts his head in the guy’s direction.

Brian’s eyes follow and then he bites his lip and nods. “Yeah, uh… yeah.”

Eames laughs. “Alright, let’s put on a show for him, hm?”

Brian’s eyes widen. “I thought you had a boyfriend.”

“I didn’t say we’d be doing anything like _that_. Here, how good are you at taking shots?”

“Uh, fine.”

“Can you do it no hands?”

“What like a blowjob shot?”

Eames grins. “Exactly, though we can do it with whatever liquor you’d like.” Eames signals the bartender and orders two shots. “Just make eye contact with him, lick your lips, get a little flirty and then use your mouth.”

“Okay.”

It takes a few shots before their target makes his own way over to Brian and in the meantime they’ve gathered a little bit of a crowd from the fellow men at the bar, cheering them on with each successful hands-free drink. The guy is focused on Brian and asks, “So, what are you doing over here?”

“Blowjob shots contest, but I think my friend Brian here won.” Eames pats him on the shoulder in a way that pushes him against the other guy. “Have fun, love,” he says, making his way through the crowd.

He’s definitely had more to drink now than planned, he’s feeling it pretty heavily. He’s in control, but there’s no doubt about his inebriation. He’s also a little unsure how long his shot detour took, but he makes his way to a bathroom anyway. Hopefully Arthur hasn’t had to wait too long, or if he has, it’s only increased his desire.

The bathroom he comes across only has one other occupant, who’s on his way out anyway. Eames wonders if he should go look for Arthur elsewhere, but then he thinks that’s a good way for the two of them to endlessly search and miss each other. Besides, he needs to take a slash and he’s starting to feel a little unsteady on his feet.

Once that’s taken care of he catches his own eye in the mirror above the sink and it feels a little unreal. He feels a little unreal.

He’s staring at himself in the mirror in the bathroom of this club and he can’t figure out who he’s looking at. Who’s looking back at him. The lines are blurry and indistinct and he can see the shape of himself, but he can’t tell what that shape means. There’s little flickers of a few people and their names rattle around his head, but they slip through his grasp before he can pin one down.

He clutches the sides of the sink and stares harder. The feeling of being adrift is making him a little panicky right now. He can feel the thud of the bassline from the club and the hazy cloud of alcohol in him. He thinks he might float away if he can’t define himself. He looks into the mirror and tries to get something to click, even if it’s just the feeling of being a voyeur to his own body. At least that gives him something to work with, a goal to get back inside himself.

“Eames.”

That’s Arthur. He looks away from his own face in the mirror and sees Arthur standing behind him. His reflected face appearing just above Eames’ shoulder. He walks closer and Eames feels the corresponding heat of his body behind him.

Arthur’s a little sweaty, his hair hanging slightly limp where it’s starting to come free of product. He’s frowning slightly. “You okay?”

Eames glances back and forth between his face and Arthur’s a few times and each pass over his own makes him feel a little edgier. Who are you? He wants to ask. Tell me your name. I can be you if I know who you are.

“Eames,” Arthur says, reaching out and putting his hand on Eames’ side. He tugs a little, turning Eames to face him.

“I don’t think I’m Eames right now,” Eames says. He thinks that’s true, but if Arthur tries to ask who he is, he still doesn’t have an answer.

Arthur’s still frowning, still holding onto him, but he nods. “Okay. Okay uh… but are you okay?”

Eames thinks about that. Is he okay? He starts to run through a mental list. He’s… physically sound. Mentally a bit of a mess. He’s drunk, but not high. He feels a slickness in his arse, maybe he got fucked earlier? No, no he prepped to get fucked, Arthur was supposed to fuck him.

Arthur came into the bathroom to fuck him. He should have taken molly, he thinks, that’s part of this isn’t it?

“Yeah,” he says, reaching out to pull Arthur closer, “Fuck me.”

“What?”

“You should fuck me.”

Maybe he should blow Arthur first, get him riled up and eager to turn him back around, bend him down over the sink and fuck him. Or Jimmy. Is it Jimmy? It feels like it might be Jimmy, but Arthur doesn’t know Jimmy. He didn’t think Arthur would really go for Jimmy, but here they are. He feels Arthur’s hands tighten on him and he thinks Arthur might’ve been talking, but the words passed him by.

He looks at Arthur again and he thinks he should say something suggestive, something to set the mood, but instead he says, “I don’t want to be Jimmy.” It feels true.

“Okay, then don’t be Jimmy.”

Eames nods. Not Jimmy, whoever he is, he’s not Jimmy. It’s easier when he has information like that, guide points that he can use as context, extrapolate from to define himself. Not Jimmy.

Time is moving strangely, but he feels a little more settled now, bracketed between the sink and Arthur. The next time he really registers Arthur’s face, he’s looking at Eames searchingly. Eames wonders if he’s transparent now, if Arthur is seeing under the paints and the stories and all the layers that Eames drapes over himself to create someone. If Arthur’s looking on the blank canvas and wondering who the man in his arms is.

“May I call you Ollie?”

Ollie, Ollie. That feels better. He nods. He thinks he might be Ollie and even if he isn’t it’s close enough that being Ollie sounds good.

“Okay, Ollie, let’s get out of here.”

He nods again. Ollie is agreeable, Ollie wants to please Arthur. He lets Arthur lead him out of the bathroom, through the club, then out onto the street. Arthur’s doing something on his phone, but Eames doesn’t pay it any mind, he focuses on holding Arthur’s free hand, staying close.

He lets Arthur bundle him into a taxi and then into their hotel room. He follows along easily, letting Arthur guide him. He feels a little muzzy, but happy to be under Arthur’s lead.

Ollie lets Arthur take him to bed. Not to fuck, Arthur’s not touching him like he wants that so he doesn’t try anything. Ollie likes that Arthur’s trying to look out for him, that he cleans him up and strips him down and then tucks him into bed. He likes it even more when Arthur follows him in, curls up with him to sleep.

Eames wakes more hungover than he’s been since he left Jimmy behind, and groans, burrowing down into bed.

“You awake?”

Eames makes a displeased noise at Arthur in response, then gathers himself enough to roughly ask, “Paracetamol?”

“On the nightstand. You might feel better if you shower.”

Eames grunts. It takes a few more minutes of listlessly lying there before he undertakes the ordeal of sitting up, finding and taking the paracetamol (sitting, as promised, on the nightstand beside a glass of water), and then hauls himself out of bed and into the bathroom for a shower.

Arthur was right, the shower does help, and he exits ready to see about some breakfast.

Arthur’s sitting there waiting for him, looking fresh and clean himself, and he’s ordered room service. Plenty of coffee and a proper fry up.

“Ta, darling,” Eames says, sitting down and diving in with a relish that would’ve been unimaginable a mere half hour prior.

Arthur waits until they’re both done eating to broach any real topic of conversation. “I wanted to ask you something,” he says.

Eames had noticed during breakfast that he seemed to have something on his mind and was waiting to see when he’d bring it up, he’s pleased that he was allowed to eat his fill first. “Yes?”

“Did my notebook bother you? The one I was writing about you…”

Eames blinks in surprise. “Oh. No.” It’s not at all a line of questioning he’d been anticipating. He’d thought more that Arthur might want to discuss what had happened at the club.

“You’re sure? Because you said—”

“What, in Vegas?” Eames interrupts.

Arthur nods.

Eames sighs. “I was just saying things to get to you. None of it meant anything.”

“So my ‘neurotic little lists’?”

“Fine by me. Fill your pages with odes to my person as you please.”

Arthur huffs. “It’s not odes, it’s notes.” He glances at Eames, looking like he’s waiting for the fallout of that. “Notes on… who you are.”

Eames smiles a little wryly. “Piecing together a personality for me?”

“I thought you might like to know there’s… there _is_ something there. You said all that stuff about roles and acting to fit that person, but there _are_ things inherent to you. I’ve got notes on it all. And about how you’ve changed.”

“Since?”

“Since we… since all this started. Don’t you think you’re different now than you were?”

“Sure,” Eames concedes. He does feel different, that’s true. He thinks he’s a bit of a blend of previous identities though, not someone wholly new.

“You said last night that you weren’t Eames.”

“I was drunk and… having a bit of an. Episode, let’s say.”

“Episode?”

Eames sighs and slouches back further into his seat. “Identity… thing. Lost track for a moment, couldn’t put the pieces together right.”

“I have pieces in my notebook.”

Eames tilts his head.

“I mean, if you wanted to put something together that… that felt like _you_.” Arthur’s blushing ever so slightly.

“Create a new identity?”

“No, not… not intentionally making one, but finding fundamental truths about yourself and embracing that.”

Eames thinks about that, taking stock of how he feels. Who he feels like. There’s enough Eames still there that the name rings true enough. And while Ollie is undeniably having an influence, he doesn’t think it’s enough to switch back to that full time. Though Ollie does feel true in its own way as well. He can feel bits of both of them, maybe others too swaying how he is. “Alright.”

“Yeah?” Arthur’s watching him carefully.

“Yes. We can consult your notebook and come up with something.”

With his blessing secured, Arthur returns to taking notes. The little moleskine makes its reappearance from wherever Arthur had stashed it. Eames still hasn’t seen its contents, though he hasn’t asked to either. He doesn’t think Arthur’s trying to keep them secret, indeed Arthur takes absolutely no precautions to keep Eames out, leaving it lying about where he could easily read it if he so desired. He just hasn’t bothered to do so, or to ask.

The places Arthur takes him after that start to seem more personal, not that they weren’t before, but there’s a certain something to them now. Like they aren’t just places Arthur likes, but rather places that _mean_ something to him. It starts with this little hole in the wall Jewish deli. They stop in for breakfast and Eames watches as Arthur has what appears to be an orgasmic experience over a bagel with lox.

“You know, if I wasn’t satisfying you adequately I do wish you’d said something before now.”

Arthur frowns for a second, then blushes and rolls his eyes. “Shut up. ‘S _good_ ,” he mumbles out, not quite done with his bite.

“Yes, I can see that,” Eames says, grinning.

Arthur huffs a little, but keeps eating. “I fucking love bagels with lox.”

“Clearly.”

“They’re pretty much the perfect breakfast food.”

Eames nods. “Oh, I’m not arguing, mine is quite delightful.”

Arthur looks satisfied, and after a moment says, “They’re just… they’re so _good_. Places like this…” He gives a slight shrug as he looks around the deli. “It’s homey.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah like, comforting. Reminds me of being a kid, but in a good way.”

“Grew up in a deli, did you?”

“Grew up eating like this.”

“Kosher?”

“No, my parents didn’t keep kosher, but we ate stuff like this. And there were certain things my mom was set about, like juice.”

“Juice?”

Arthur nods, laughing. “Yeah, no juice unless it was Kedem in the house. It’s strange the things people get attached to. She’d eat oysters, but she’d be damned if there was a bottle of Welch’s on the table.”

“People are like that. Strange habits and little things, often contradictory. Food especially, there’s sustenance, but there’s also tradition and culture and religion all tied in. Memory.”

Arthur hums thoughtfully. “She made fucking amazing matzo ball soup when I was a kid. One of those ‘she made it the way her mom made it who learned from her mom’ type things. I swear that soup was the cure for anything.”

Eames smiles. “Yeah?” He’s picturing a tiny little Arthur with a sniffly nose, just waiting for a bowl of his mother’s magical soup to make him feel better. It’s a precious image.

“Yeah. Do you have foods like that? Y’know, just feel… comforting. Like home.”

Eames pauses, thinking it over. “Coddle and colcannon.”

“What’re those?”

“Coddle’s just leftovers stew. Sausages, bacon, potatoes, onions, whatever else goes in the pot and you let it cook a few hours. Colcannon is mashed potatoes with cabbage in.”

“So just a lot of potatoes, then?”

“I was raised by an Irish woman.”

Arthur does that shrug and nod that seem to indicate, ‘fair point’.

“Though most of the time she wasn’t cooking for us, that wasn’t her job. But those were things she’d make when it was just the two of us.”

“So it’s more comforting.”

“Yes.”

Arthur finishes his bagel and sighs. “I was planning on getting us cold cut sandwiches for lunch, but now that I’m here all I want is pastrami.”

“Get that instead.”

Arthur shakes his head. “It’ll get cold by the time we’re ready to eat and I want a fresh hot pastrami sandwich, not soggy leftovers that’ve been sitting around for hours.”

“Are we going somewhere that prevents us from procuring fresh food?”

Arthur shrugs, looking a little hesitant. “I… well, I wanted to take you to Prospect Park.”

A delighted grin spreads across Eames’ face. “Arthur, are you taking me out on a picnic?”

Arthur scowls slightly, though not with any real feeling. “It’d be nice.”

“Oh, it would be _very_ nice, I’ve no doubt. But if your heart is set on hot pastrami we could go to the park and then go to a deli for lunch.”

Arthur nods. “Yeah… yeah that would work. I thought I’d be happy with the cold cuts until I got here.” He eyes the deli case with an eager gaze. “Yeah, we’ll do that.”

Prospect Park is lovely. Nowhere near as expansive as Central Park, but it is large and charming. There’s a number of old stone bridges, a boathouse, and an old carousel. Eames finds himself particularly taken with the carousel, it’s one of those true old nineteenth century style ones, thrumming with history in much the same way antiques and vintage clothing are.

There’s also some sort of historic house, a Dutch farm thing, but it’s flooded by people trying to teach their children something or other about history so Arthur and Eames steer clear, more content to walk along the paths by themselves.

True to their earlier agreement, come lunchtime Arthur directs him to another little Jewish deli and orders a positively massive hot pastrami sandwich. The layers of meat are laughably tall, but Arthur tucks in with gusto, not minding that there’s no elegant way to eat it.

Eames barely reins in the instinct, the desire he has to reach across the table and swipe his thumb across some of the juices that have gathered in the corner of Arthur’s mouth.

Another day sees Arthur taking him out to Coney Island, which seems to be a place they both heartily agree on. It clearly has some sort of nostalgia factor for Arthur and for Eames, it appeals to his love of kitsch.

It’s crowded, but that’s okay. They make their way through the sea of people, the couples on dates, the families with overeager children tugging their parents to attraction after attraction. They do all the cliches, the beach, the boardwalk, the carnival food. They ride the ferris wheel and even kiss at the top of it, Eames’ stomach flutters at that in a way he can’t say he’s experienced in years.

It feels like the sort of date Ollie dreamt of when he was young.

They go to the Guggenheim. They’ve already gone to the Met and MoMA, but Arthur seems particularly keen on the Guggenheim. Eames suspects the draw of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building itself holds much of the appeal. Indeed, though it’s obviously not his first visit, Arthur is taken with the pristine white loops and bands of the building, the way they stretch and curl. Eames can appreciate the vision of it, even if it isn’t exactly to his taste.

They don’t go out to any more clubs. A few bars here and there, but ones that are properly bars, no chance of being mistaken for a club. Eames wonders if Arthur’s doing it on purpose, holding back for his sake after what happened last time. If that’s the case he wants to tell him not to, that he’s adaptable, that he’ll mould himself to whatever Arthur wants.

But maybe Arthur doesn’t want any more clubs, which is fine too. Eames decides to leave it be for the time being. Arthur’s new itinerary has a feeling of intimacy, of revealing himself, that wasn’t there before. So perhaps clubs aren’t part of that. Eames doesn’t need to press, so long as he’s sticking to his role and Arthur’s happy with it, that’s all that matters.

Though, with the acceptance of that, does come a new emphasis on understanding his role. It’s not that he’s been unaware, he’s been highly aware of crafting himself to fit Arthur’s life ever since he found Arthur at Cobb’s. Every choice he’s made since then has been carefully calculated.

Or, maybe that’s not exactly accurate. He hasn’t felt quite as in charge as usual, when he’s being deliberate. He’s made mistakes and had to correct them. He’s laid basis in truth, in his past, in a way he never would have before. He’s allowed those facts, those truths to shine through and mix in with what he is.

It’s been a messier and more fraught process than any identity he’s carefully and deliberately created before, but he wants the reward for this one more than he’s wanted any other he can remember. He wants to ensure that whatever it is he’s becoming, whoever it is, is someone that fits so neatly into Arthur’s life that the other man wouldn’t think to question it.

He thinks it’s starting to settle into a clearer picture, the details coming into better focus.

But it could be clearer. He’s held off on the temptation to read Arthur’s notebook, but he’s never been good at keeping his hands to himself, at not snooping. He’s honestly a little shocked at himself for not having read it ages ago, but he’s thought it would be better to hold back, to let Arthur keep a secret in plain sight, no matter how tempting.

And it is tempting. Such an innocuous little thing, a plain black moleskine. Unremarkable, yet possessing untold information. A potential goldmine to check himself, check if the man he’s been spinning into existence fits Arthur’s vision.

He doesn’t think Arthur would mind if he read it. Might even encourage it. Maybe he’s been holding himself back for no reason at all, an unneeded token of deference to Arthur’s privacy where none was necessary. After all, Arthur did say they would consult the notebook to create the new version.

Arthur’s out at the moment so Eames can’t ask, not unless he wants to call him. It seems unnecessary. He debates briefly, but his curiosity and desire to know win quickly. It helps that he’s fairly certain Arthur’s fine with him reading it.

It’s light, small, easy to lift and open. He settles in his seat and turns to the first page, eager to see what it holds. What image he might find in its pages.

And there he is, laid out in Arthur’s neat but cramped little handwriting. The first pages have a lot of bullet points and arrows. Fragments of thoughts and single words followed by question marks, circled and connected to other things. Things like _vintage, clothes, acting, forging, identity, concept of self._ Buzzwords for further investigation.

As it goes on, it starts to list facts. _Raised by nanny, from money. Some sort of familial estrangement._ Under this is _abuse?_ small, but underlined. Then, _importance of nanny (mother figure? Mother unavailable? Father?)_

_Adaptable. Overwhelmed by emotions (ease w/lies). Uses sex as tool/distraction/manipulation (conscious or unconscious? Both?). Likes fancy food, but not snob (though pretentious). Clever. Fundamental disconnect from concept of self (fractured. Psychology—research). Eager to experience, reluctant to show hand. Gambling (literal, also figurative? Enjoys. Compulsion/addictive tendencies?). Childhood trauma (parents). Picks fights (insecurity, attachment theory—research)._

There are longer sentences in the later pages, things he told Arthur when they were camping, about his parents, his nanny, his name.

_Abandonment issues (parental neglect, nanny taken away, likely ties w/picking fights/running). Bravado over lower self esteem, confident in skills but not in self (How can you value yourself if you don’t think you have a self?). Self as tool? (Identities created for job, basis of self concept as useful vs not useful?) Enjoys luxury/being taken care of. “Blank canvas” - metaphor of self. Intuitive. Intelligent. Resourceful. Imaginative. Creative. Defensive (most offense is preemptive defense). Lashing out. Difficulty stepping back from analysis of others (bases actions on others expectations/desires/annoyances)._

_Mother, addiction issues (mentioned pills and her being mentally checked out… tied to own gambling? Also own drug usage?). Father violent. Extreme neglect. Attachment issues, fundamental distrust in stability of relationships/care. Desire for love but lack of trust in it. Unable to see himself as existing outside acting, dismissive of idea he has a self._

_Reminder: further research personality disorders from childhood abuse._

It’s overwhelming. He closes the notebook.

There’s more that he didn’t read, but he doesn’t think he wants to. At least, not now. It’s not necessarily surprising information, not really anything he didn’t already know himself but to see it all laid out so plainly. To see the sum of his parts tallied in Arthur’s hand. It does something to him he’s not sure he likes.

He’s looking at a portrait of himself as seen through Arthur’s eyes and he finds it wanting. It makes him wonder at Arthur’s own masochistic tendencies, to want to be with him despite all those things on those pages. Or perhaps, in cataloguing them so neatly Arthur intends to exorcise them. Eames thinks that makes more sense than to desire them. Unless Arthur really does just have a thing for hopeless headcases.

A comparison of himself to Cobb flashes through his head and he blanches. It isn’t flattering and he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want it to be like that. He should be better than that, he can be better than that.

He’ll make himself better than that if it’s the last thing he does.

He makes sure not to let on once Arthur returns, to keep himself steady and unruffled. A continuation of how he was before he knew. But he does start to redouble his efforts to mould himself around Arthur, deferent to his wishes, malleable under Arthur’s hand. It isn’t about making himself mindless, Arthur wouldn’t go for that, but rather continuing to sand at himself until any of his sharper edges that once caught against Arthur are smooth, until he’s whittled himself into something that so perfectly fits the shape of Arthur.

They go out one night, stay out late and wind up in a late night ramen spot, sitting close and slurping noodles and drinking sake. It’s warm and intimate and it makes Eames’ heart ache. He’s nearly overwhelmed by the face of his own want, it’s almost bittersweet, the way the feeling manifests. Like he’s already missing something that’s laid out before him. He hasn’t lost it, but he wants to keep it so badly he can feel the echo of pain if he were to lose it.

Arthur grins at him across the table, knocking their knees together, before pausing, his expression turning more contemplative. “What?”

Eames shakes his head. “Nothing at all.” He raises his glass for a toast and Arthur quirks his eyebrow, but follows along anyway.

They get back to the hotel and there’s no more sake, but there is wine. Eames pours them each a glass, then another, and another. He’s wine drunk and it’s a fuzzy sort of warmth that feels almost indulgent. There’s a physicality to it, a hedonistic want. He sprawls out on the couch and watches Arthur stripping down.

He wants to lay himself out as an offering, his body there for whatever Arthur wants to take.

Arthur should know that, should know that everything he is, everything he has is on offer. All Arthur has to do is take, is lead, Eames will follow.

“What?” Arthur asks again, looking a little amused.

Eames spreads his legs and beckons Arthur to join him.

Arthur does, settling on the couch and then letting Eames draw him in. Eames pulls at him until he can feel the warmth, the weight of Arthur’s body pressed against him. Then he peppers little kisses to the side of Arthur’s neck where he can reach. “You’re lovely.”

Arthur laughs softly. “You’re drunk.”

Eames hums. “Perhaps. Doesn’t stop you from being lovely.”

Arthur turns his head and catches his lips in a kiss and that’s even lovelier. Eames feels himself go a little boneless under it, body lax and mouth following Arthur’s lead. He’s pliant and pliable, but not passive. Receptive. He parts his lips, his legs, himself. All Arthur has to do is dip inside.

They build up a steady rhythm, kissing and touching. Eames drops a hand to feel for Arthur’s flies, but Arthur pauses and grabs Eames’ wrist, stopping his progress. He drops a few kisses to Eames’ jaw before he pulls back. He’s grinning and mussed, his lips are kiss swollen and his eyes fond. “Lemme get some water.”

Eames nods and Arthur kisses him again before getting up. He watches Arthur go, barefoot on the carpet and down to just his undershirt and trousers.

Arthur returns with the water and sits down properly this time instead of on top of Eames. He’s leaned back casually, sipping the water, relaxed.

Eames watches him, the lines of his throat, the way his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. His lips against the bottle and his hair a little mussed. He looks tender and soft and warm and lovely. Eames wants to reach out and fold him up gently.

“You like Eames, right?” He asks.

Arthur looks at him, a little startled, then a little uneasy, like he thinks this is another test. He sets the bottle down. “I do like you.”

Eames shakes his head, keeping his body language relaxed and hoping Arthur picks up on that and relaxes again too. “No, I mean. Eames. He’s who you were initially interested in, yes?”

“Yes,” Arthur says, “But I’m interested in _you_.”

“Sure, sure,” Eames says easily, “But it was Eames you wanted. At least, before you realized the… situation.”

Arthur nods, still looking a little wary, like Eames might be about to spring some kind of trap on him.

“But now that you know about… Eames. What do you think of him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you still interested in him? Or now that you know it doesn’t have to be him, or at least, not all aspects of him…”

Arthur frowns slightly. “Are you asking my opinion on Eames like, pros and cons?”

Eames shrugs. “If you’d like.”

“Like, an assessment of him as… a character?”

“You like him, but there might be things you dislike?”

“Sure, no one’s perfect.”

“But I can be.”

“What?” Arthur sits up a little straighter, no longer lounging back.

“That’s precisely my point.” Eames shifts a little where he’s sprawled on one end of the couch, he reaches his foot out to rest against Arthur’s thigh. “If you want Eames, I can be him. But I doubt he’s exactly what you want. Close perhaps, but there’s things you could do without. Maybe some other things you’d like.”

“What are you saying?”

“I can be anyone you want me to be, all I need to know is what you want.”

Arthur’s stiff, quiet, then, “Build my own boyfriend?”

Eames nods. “Whatever you’d like, I can be him.”

Arthur’s frozen in place, a frown on his face and taking deliberate breaths like he’s purposely holding himself together. Eames can feel the tension in his body under the arch of his foot where it still rests on Arthur’s thigh. He didn’t mean to upset Arthur, he thought a more transparent offering would be a better way to go rather than guessing at what Arthur does and doesn’t want, but maybe he was wrong.

Arthur’s watching him, his eyes darting across Eames’ face and maybe that’s it. Maybe he’s concerned it’s a trick, a game. Eames stays lax and keeps his expression open. He wants Arthur to know it’s genuine. He has Eames, he has whoever he wants to see in Eames.

It takes a moment before Arthur speaks, a little hesitant, but with a steel conviction in his tone nonetheless, “I’d… I’d like to step out for some air.”

While a complete sentence, Eames can tell from the way he said it that it’s an incomplete thought. “But?” He prompts.

“But,” Arthur says, “Will you still be here if I do?”

A fair question, especially after Vegas. They both remember what happened last time Arthur decided he needed some air. It’s different this time though. They aren’t fighting. Arthur’s asking and Eames. Well, Eames doesn’t want to run.

“I’ll be here,” Eames says.

Arthur makes a face and Eames wonders if he’s trying to figure out if Eames is lying. He wonders if Arthur believes him or not. But Arthur nods and gathers his shoes, moving with a deliberate rigidity and avoiding looking Eames’ way. He leaves and Eames stays and waits.

He thinks about running, vaguely. Like a thought exercise, but not something he intends to do. He’s not weighing it as an option, rather as a theoretical. He thinks if he ran this time that might be the end. He knows he doesn’t want that.

It takes a bit longer for Arthur to return than he thought it would, though, if pressed he’s not exactly sure he could say how long he expected it to take. Maybe it’s less that it was longer than expected, but rather longer than desired. Long enough for Eames to start to wonder, just a little, if Arthur has been the one to run this time. 

He hasn’t moved from his place on the couch, but after a while he wonders if he should go to bed. Or maybe just sleep where he is. He wonders if Arthur wants him to wait up. He wonders if Arthur’s coming back at all.

He’s just starting to think about how long to stay in this hotel room alone before he has to face facts and realize Arthur cut his losses, when Arthur returns.

Eames can’t tell if he looks surprised or not to see that he didn’t run. He isn’t even quite sure if Arthur looks happy, there’s something a little anxious overlaying his expression. Earnest, though a bit troubled.

“I made too many assumptions before,” Arthur says, returning to the couch, where Eames still rests.

“Hm?”

“Places I was taking you… for Eames.”

Eames frowns. “I thought we were going places for you now?”

“We are, but…” Arthur frowns and glances around the room before looking back at Eames. “I took you places for Eames.”

“Yes.”

“And they were Eames’ interests, right?”

Eames nods. “You did very well, darling. It was near perfection—”

Arthur shakes his head. “Let’s go somewhere for you.”

“I thought you did that too much the first time?”

“For _you_ ,” Arthur says with such intensity that Eames falls silent.

Arthur reaches up and cups the sides of Eames’ face and his touch is so gentle it makes Eames feel fragile under it. “Let me take you somewhere for _you_ , Ollie.”

Eames’ breath catches in his throat and he swallows hard. “Okay,” he says, and it comes out whisper soft and a little rough.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to everyone who commented!
> 
> Sometimes as writers we get to explore our dreams of the NYC brownstone we’ll never own. This is a valid use of fic that I stand by.

Eames expects to be whisked off to the airport en route to another city or country, perhaps even another continent, but instead their taxi winds through New York until it comes to a stop in a perfectly picturesque neighborhood. All brownstones and tree lined streets. Eames is caught off guard, but Arthur seems to think this is exactly where they should be, exiting and fetching their luggage.

Eames follows behind, trying to determine exactly where Arthur has brought him. It’s not until Arthur marches up the steps to one of the brownstones, feeling about in his pocket for a set of keys and then searching for the right one to the door, that it hits him.

It feels incredibly dense to be so slow on the uptake, like he’s lost his touch, but he defends himself internally with the reassurance that surely, he could never have expected to be taken to Arthur’s _home_ of all places. Which, as Arthur slots the key into the lock and turns it, is what Eames thinks this has to be.

Arthur steps in and goes about unarming the alarm system and such, while Eames follows behind slowly, taking in the home before him. The entryway has a coat rack and an umbrella stand as well as a small table with a stack of envelopes, what appears to be a backlog of post that Arthur has yet to deal with.

As they move into the house proper, Eames sees it’s full of very tasteful midcentury modern furniture. Not at all clinical, but plenty of clean lines and elegantly retro pieces. It isn’t overdone, like a themed room, rather everything is classic enough to stand the test of time while evoking a certain period.

“Oh darling, is this why you like me, then?”

Arthur frowns, looking at him in askance.

Eames gestures to himself. “Eames. I fit the decor, though it seems you have yet to buy yourself an Eames lounge. But I will offer my lap if you so desire.”

Arthur rolls his eyes. “I have some Herman Miller stuff, including Eames designs.”

“Did you miss me that much? To have to fill your home with reminders of me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Arthur says, dryly but with no bite.

Eames smiles and continues his exploration.

The walls are decorated with carefully arranged framed film posters, but rather than the sixties spy thrillers Eames would have selected for the place, it’s a gallery ode to seventies and eighties sci fi. There’s _Back to the Future_ hung beside the first _Mad Max_ , at least one of both the _Star Wars_ and _Star Trek_ films, _Blade Runner_ , _Alien_ , _Akira_.

These are interspersed with fine art. An Escher print here, a Francis Bacon painting there, a Frank Auerbach drawing across the way. It seems Arthur has a taste for British figurativism.

“Have any Freud?”

“What?”

“Lucian, I mean.”

“Oh. No, I don’t.”

Eames hums and continues walking along, gathering details of this house. This home. Arthur’s home.

Built-in bookshelves are full of more science fiction, he spots some Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Douglas Adams, some novels like _Catch-22_ and _The Metamorphosis_ , there’s _Maus_ and _Angels in America_ , some very dry informational looking volumes, and a number of architectural tomes.

There’s another film poster in the kitchen, this one entirely in Japanese featuring a drawing of a woman’s head surrounded by hundreds of tiny images, people and objects too small to define.

“What’s this one, then?”

“ _Paprika_.”

“ _Paprika_?”

“It’s… ironic, I guess.”

Eames tilts his head.

Arthur has a soft, almost sheepish smile. “Paprika. She’s a dream… doctor-slash-detective I guess. Kind of a forge, maybe, but not exactly. It’s a surreal sci fi thriller about a device to enter dreams and what happens after it gets stolen. Lots of surreal imagery and stuff where the line between dreams and reality starts to blur.”

Eames raises his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“It’s a good movie.”

“I’m sure.”

Arthur shrugs. “We can have takeout for dinner tonight. We’ll have to go shopping for food, it’s been a while since I was here.”

“Quite alright,” Eames says. His back is turned, but he hears Arthur leaving the room. He pokes around in the cabinets, nothing there of particular note. Just the normal sorts of things one might expect to find in a kitchen, save for the distinct lack of food. Though there is a good stock of nonperishables in the pantry.

Eames wants to get his hands on everything in the house, poke and prod and turn up all the secrets he can find. Surely Arthur knows what he’s done by inviting Eames into his home. He knows Eames, knows he can’t help but investigate and touch everything in his reach.

He continues this upstairs, finding an office (too much to explore for now, so he leaves that for later), a guest bedroom, another bathroom. He comes into what is obviously the master bedroom, Arthur’s bedroom, and finds Arthur unpacking his luggage, putting all his clothes in their proper place. Eames’ own luggage sits there too, though it’s unopened.

“I’ll clear out some space for your things in here if you’d like,” Arthur says, “I think I can consolidate to give you two drawers and some closet space.”

Eames is a little taken aback by the offer, it seems strange, but not unwelcome. “That will be just fine.”

Arthur nods and goes about finishing his unpacking and rearranging. He turns to Eames expectantly once he’s done and Eames starts slightly, though he does keep any tells of that internal. At least, he hopes he does. He sets his own clothing in the newly vacated spots and tries his best to tell himself this is a perfectly normal thing to do, no reason to make any sort of fuss about it. But as he looks at his own clothing folded away in the drawers of Arthur’s dresser, in Arthur’s bedroom, in Arthur’s _home_ he can’t help but think it seems just a little unreal.

It would be strange if Arthur had installed him in the guest bedroom after sharing the same hotel rooms for so long, and he certainly doesn’t want the distance, but there is something very strange and large about the idea of sharing Arthur’s space like this. Intimate in a whole new and almost overwhelming way.

There’s a master bath off the master bedroom and Eames is directed there to deposit his various toiletries. His toothpaste beside Arthur’s. Their toothbrushes together in a little cup beside the sink. It’s the same as they did in the hotels, but here it’s an arresting sight. He stares at those seemingly innocuous sticks of plastic, feeling his heart beat and his skin tingle until Arthur calls out from downstairs.

“Thai okay?”

“Fine,” Eames calls back. Shaking himself, he leaves the bathroom and joins Arthur downstairs.

Dinner is easy, not awkward. They settle in at the table to eat and are able to get back to their normal dynamic. Teasing and conversation flowing easily. The food is good and the company’s better. Eames has shelved their surroundings for further contemplation later, there’s no reason to act odd and spoil the evening.

It’s not until they get ready for bed that it washes back over him. He’s careful to not let it show, to go through the motions of preparing for bed the same as he would any other night. To go to the side of the bed that’s gotten customary for him, though upon doing so he does feel a little overwhelmed to realize they’ve been sharing a bed long enough to both have claimed usual sides.

Monumental as that is in general, it’s washed away in the face of Arthur climbing into bed. His own bed. Where Eames now is, with him. It has an intensity that none of those anonymous hotel beds had. This is Arthur’s bed, in Arthur’s room, in Arthur’s house.

“You okay?” Arthur asks after a moment.

Eames realizes he’s a bit stiff, a bit frozen. Not how he usually settles into bed. In fact, Arthur’s griped that at times sharing a bed with Eames is like sharing one with an overheated octopus. All grasping limbs and elevated sleep temperature.

“Fine,” he says, throwing a leg over one of Arthur’s, the insides of their thighs pressed together reassuringly. “Just getting used to a new mattress.”

He can practically hear Arthur’s raised eyebrow, dark as it is. “Unlike all the different hotel ones?”

Eames hums and wiggles, both to get more settled, but also because he knows it will distract Arthur.

Arthur sighs and grabs at him, tangling them together. “Better?”

“Mh-hm.” Eames settles, determined to embrace sleep and leave the ramifications of their location for later pondering.

Sleep comes more easily than he’d thought, with the reassuring feel of Arthur against him, the soothing sound of his deepening breath a familiar soundtrack to lull him to sleep. In the morning, Eames wakes alone, though that’s alright. Arthur tends to be an earlier riser than him, there’s plenty of mornings he’s awoken to find the bed empty. He stretches out languorously, enjoying a slow and easy start to his wakefulness. There’s a pleasant patch of sun coming through the gaps in the curtains that has left a warm stripe across the bed.

He can smell coffee so he knows Arthur’s surely downstairs in the kitchen, already starting to tend to the day’s tasks. Whatever those may be.

He gets up, briefly considers doing something about his bedhead when he spies himself in the mirror as he brushes his teeth, but dismisses the idea in the same moment it comes to him. He can shower later, right now he’s too enamoured of the lazy morning to bother with it.

When he gets downstairs he sees there is a pot of coffee on the counter, but no Arthur in sight. He pours himself a cup and thinks about searching the house for him, perhaps he’s retreated to his office? But before he makes his way back upstairs, he spots Arthur through the kitchen window.

Arthur’s sitting in a chair on the back porch, cup of coffee in one hand and his tablet in the other. He’s got a slight frown as he reads.

Eames observes him for a moment, how serious he looks, even though he’s still in his pajamas with his own bedhead. Then he goes outside to join him.

“Good morning.”

Arthur looks up from his tablet. “Good morning. Sleep well?”

“Mmm,” Eames hums in affirmation, taking a sip of his coffee and settling in the chair beside Arthur’s.

It’s a beautiful clear day, a gentle breeze in the air and the sun warm, but not stifling.

“Plans for the day?” Eames asks.

“Food shopping, that’s the number one priority.”

Eames nods.

“Other than that…” Arthur shrugs. “Nothing in particular. Was there something you wanted to do?”

Eames shakes his head. “Nothing in particular, no.”

“Lazy day in, then.”

“Besides the shopping.”

Arthur tilts his head in agreement. “Besides the shopping.”

“You know they have these services now, quite incredible, they’ll deliver your shopping to you. If we wanted to truly have a lazy day in. That is, if you’re willing to allow anyone else to know the location of this secret fortress of yours.”

Arthur snorts. “Eames, I ordered Thai delivery last night.”

Eames shrugs. “Perhaps you have an agreement with the restaurant, help you keep up a front.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Really though.” Eames turns to face him more fully. “How do you manage this place?”

“I have someone who comes once a week when I’m not here, she keeps an eye on things. Makes sure nothing’s wrong. No burst pipes or anything. Brownstones can have a tendency for things to go wrong, and the historical protections that you have to fix them in specific ways. I’ve got her to keep me updated in case something happens. And she handles getting someone to clear the sidewalk in winter so I don’t get fined for someone busting their ass on an icy patch walking by.”

“And she stacks your post for you in the foyer?”

“She does.”

“What is it she thinks you do, away from home so often?”

“Important businessman who pays well enough to not have any more detailed questions asked.”

Eames laughs.

They lapse into silence for a bit, just enjoying their coffee and the serenity of the morning on Arthur’s back porch. He has a little patch of a yard, not large, but well tended. The brick walls surrounding it and the peeks into the neighboring yards reminds Eames of terraced houses back in England. A bit more upscale though, clearly.

“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

Eames looks over at Arthur, sees the slight anxiety writ across his brow. “Before we even have breakfast? Is it dire?”

“Not dire, no. Just… something.”

“Oh, keep me guessing then.”

Arthur huffs out a breath, it sounds more amused than annoyed. “I had a question.”

“Mm?”

“Can I call you Ollie?”

Eames is surprised, it’s certainly not on the list of possible questions he’d come up with. “Oh… sure,” he answers, not lingering over considerations as to the pros and cons. The implications.

“Are you sure?”

Eames shrugs. “It’s fine.”

Arthur sighs. “I just asked because I’ve called you it a few times, but we never really talked about it.”

“It’s fine,” Eames says again.

“Is it really?”

“Yes,” Eames says, starting to feel slightly annoyed at going round in circles, “I said it was fine.”

Arthur doesn’t say anything, instead he looks down at his coffee.

“Is this how it’s going to be now?” Eames asks.

Arthur looks up.

“You not trusting a word from my mouth? I’ve been saying things I _meant_.”

“It’s not…” Arthur sighs again, rubbing the fingers of his free hand against his temples. “I believe that you’ve meant it, I just don’t want you agreeing because you think that’s what I want to hear.”

“I told you that name for a reason, it’s not something I go round sharing.”

“I know that. I _know_ that, Eames. But I also know you literally offered to become _anyone_ for me _two_ nights ago.”

Eames sniffs. “One might think that would be deserving of more gratitude than censure,” he says primly.

Arthur’s frowning heavily. “I told you I want _you_. I want whoever the fuck you want to be, not someone you make to please me.”

“You don’t want to be pleased?”

“Don’t be fucking obtuse.”

“I can be combative if that’s what you desire.”

“That’s the point! That’s the whole goddamn _point!_ Don’t do it because you’re calculating off my reactions, do it because it’s what _you_ want!”

Eames can feel himself gearing up to swing back, to meet Arthur in this and continue to ratchet things up until they’re having a proper domestic. His pulse is pounding and his mind is flitting between every sore spot, every weakness he knows of Arthur’s, honing in on crafting the perfect barbs to stick. To cut and wound and pierce.

But then he remembers his resolve to stop lashing out, to be better about tempering himself. He pauses and takes a deep breath.

Arthur sighs. “Fuck. Sorry, I don’t want to fight.”

“I don’t either.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have… I shouldn’t have come at you like that.”

Eames shrugs. “I’ve been told I’m rather difficult.”

Arthur barks out a laugh, sharp, but not cruel. “I’ve been told the same.”

Eames hums lightly.

Arthur sighs again. With a slight trace of humour he says, “You’re moody, did you know that?”

“Slightly mercurial,” Eames says, lightly as well, “As are you, I’ll have you know.”

“What a pair.”

“Perfect match.”

Arthur finishes his coffee and stretches. “What do you want for breakfast?”

“I’m sure I’m fine with whatever you’d like.”

Arthur nods and stands, starting to make his way back inside.

Eames catches his wrist as Arthur moves past him. “You may call me Ollie,” he says, looking out at the yard, but keeping Arthur in his peripheral vision, “Perhaps… perhaps not always. Not fully replacing Eames. But you may use it.”

Arthur nods and turns his hand in Eames’ hold so he can lace their fingers together. He squeezes for a brief moment, then lets go and continues inside.

Eames takes another sip of his coffee, feeling more at peace now.

It’s surprisingly easy to settle into a rhythm in Arthur’s brownstone. It doesn’t mean Eames doesn’t still get bowled over by the magnitude of what they’re doing at times, but on the whole he finds it much easier than he suspected it would be that first night. He seems to fit far more neatly into Arthur’s life than he could have hoped, and without requiring as much effort as he was willing to expend.

He isn’t stupid, and neither is Arthur. He knows Arthur will be keeping an eye on him to ensure he isn’t trying too hard to be pleasing, he knows he has to do his best to fulfill what Arthur’s asked. Truly asked. Not what he thinks Arthur’s asked. He isn’t positive that he knows how to do that, but he knows he has to. There’s no other option that ends the way he wants, with Arthur by his side.

For all that they’ve gotten close through their entire holiday, gotten to know each other better, there’s a certain intimacy of knowledge that comes of living with Arthur in his own home. Little things that people only do when they can relax in the comfort and safety of a space they know to be their own. Nothing huge, but revealing in tender little ways that Eames hoards and cherishes, these tiny bits of Arthur that no one else has the privilege to see.

There’s also the knowledge that comes of things like investigating the house, Arthur’s office. It comes as a bit of a surprise that he finds little there. Not that Arthur hid things, but rather as he combs through the desk and files, he finds little he didn’t already know. Arthur’s laid himself bare to Eames in ways that render investigation unnecessary.

It’s not something Eames is used to. He’s used to fronts and subterfuge. Of withheld information, emotions. Of having to sneak around to find things out instead of trusting he’ll be outright told. Eavesdropping and lock picking and all those skills that came in so handy as a thief weren’t things he originally learnt for that purpose, he learnt them because he had to as a child. Because there was no other way to know things, to be certain of the truth.

With Arthur, for all that they do miscommunicate at times, there’s no need for that. It’s as refreshing as it is overwhelming.

“Arthur,” Eames says, walking into the bedroom, “What do you think about—oh.”

Arthur’s in naught but his pants and a button up, yet to be buttoned. “Yes?”

Not the most scandalous attire, but Eames can’t help that it does something for him. All thought of his question drops as he takes in the sight that Arthur makes.

“What is it?” Arthur’s got that sweet little wrinkle on his brow, the one he gets when he’s confused.

“The inherent eroticism of finding you in such dishabille utterly does me in,” Eames says.

Eames watches a few emotions flicker and battle across Arthur’s face. Confusion into amusement into heat.

“Oh?” Arthur says, obviously deciding on picking up threads of arousal rather than humour.

“Mh-hm.” Eames walks over to him and pulls him into a kiss he eagerly reciprocates.

It turns heated quickly, Eames tucking his hands under Arthur’s open shirt so he can run them over his bare skin. Arthur pulling him in close, eager and wanting.

Arthur’s just started to strip Eames down, when Eames walks him back, pushing him down onto the bed. Arthur lands and spreads his legs, pulling Eames down on top of him to continue the kiss. He runs his hands down Eames’ back and stops at his arse, grabbing and arching up under Eames with a certain intent Eames can’t help but notice.

He pulls back from the kiss. “Mm, you want me to fuck you?”

Arthur nods.

Arthur mostly prefers to top and Eames to bottom, it works for them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t also like to indulge in the novelty of switching it up on occasion.

Eames grins. “Your wish is my command.”

He strips off his shirt while Arthur shimmies further up the bed to allow Eames the room to join him. Once he’s dropped the rest of his clothes he does, climbing on and settling over Arthur to kiss and grind down, even though Arthur’s still partially clothed. It’s not until he’s got Arthur worked up enough that he’s got his legs tight around Eames’ waist and is moaning into their kisses that Eames pulls back to divest Arthur of the last of his clothing.

Arthur’s lovely and flushed under him, mussed and panting and spread out like a feast for Eames to devour.

He grins, then grabs Arthur by the hips and flips him. Arthur could stop him if he really wanted, but he goes along easily, arching his back and getting comfortable on his stomach.

Eames reaches over to grab the lube and pushes Arthur’s legs a little further apart.

“Arse up,” Eames says, starting to lube up his fingers.

Arthur obliges with a tilt of his hips.

“More,” Eames says, watching as Arthur shifts his position a little to do so. “More,” he repeats, a little sing-song this time.

Arthur turns his head to look back over his shoulder. “This is purely for your benefit, not for the actual position, isn’t it?”

“Guilty as charged,” Eames says with a grin. “Can’t help myself when I’ve got you all laid out like this.”

Arthur’s ears are tipped with red, one of his more endearing tells, but he doesn’t look too embarrassed. He huffs and turns his head back. “I hope you aren’t expecting me to hold some ridiculous Cirque du Soleil pose for you.”

“Don’t worry, I want you comfortable.” Eames strokes his non-lubed hand over the small of Arthur’s back and feels Arthur’s body sink into a position he can hold.

He starts off easy, just rubbing a lubed finger against Arthur’s hole. Enough pressure not to tease, but not pushing for anything fast. Arthur likes anal stimulation just fine, but when it comes to penetration he needs a bit more buildup and rarely do they do more than the classic finger up the arse with a blowjob.

A single finger usually does it for him, Arthur’s more about prostate stimulation and one finger is all he requires for that.

Eames on the other hand, though also a fan of prostate stimulation, no doubt, also relishes in the stretch and fullness of penetration in a way Arthur generally doesn’t. It’s not that Arthur doesn’t like getting fucked on occasion, they do enjoy switching sometimes, but he doesn’t have the same desire to be filled that Eames prefers.

So it is a little bit of a treat for Eames to push a second finger in and feel the way Arthur clenches and then slowly relaxes. To sink in and hold until Arthur’s body welcomes him.

There’s a little hitch of Arthur’s breath as Eames starts to move his fingers.

“Don’t worry,” Eames soothes, “I’ve got you.”

“‘M not worried.”

“Shh,” Eames shushes him, crooking his fingers and pushing down to rub against his prostate.

Arthur cries out sharply and rocks back.

“There you are,” Eames says. He moves with the rhythm Arthur’s started to establish until he thinks it’s enough, then quickly gets a condom on and his cock lubed up. “Ready?”

Arthur makes some sort of muffled noise of agreement against the sheets.

Eames lines up and pushes in slowly, taking care to ease in and wait until Arthur signals he’s ready to move. “Fuck,” he says reverently, “Christ, but you feel good.”

“You too,” Arthur murmurs. He rocks back against Eames.

“Yeah?”

“Mh-hm.”

Eames takes him by the hips and starts up a slow, but deep pace. Arthur makes the most arousing little gasp each time he bottoms out and it makes him a little worried he won’t manage to last. He pushes one of Arthur’s legs up and out a little so he can brace himself for a better angle, trying until Arthur practically wails under him, his back arching as he clenches down hard.

“There?”

“ _Yeah_.”

Eames leverages his heavier weight against Arthur to keep him pinned in place, even though Arthur’s started to try to writhe under him, and thrusts harder. He gets a hand under Arthur and manages to find an angle where he can grab Arthur’s cock and stroke in time with his thrusts. It doesn’t take long before Arthur comes with a cry, clenching down around Eames as he rides it out.

Eames braces himself against the bed and bites at the juncture where Arthur’s shoulder meets his neck, only a few more thrusts before he tips over too. He’s panting harshly against Arthur’s neck, but manages to not collapse down on top of him. He kisses at the light bruise he’s surely left, then pitches over to land on his back beside Arthur.

“Fuck, that was good.”

Arthur’s still sprawled out flat on his front, but manages a loose nod.

Eames laughs breathlessly and closes his eyes, lets the waves of endorphins wash over him. He’ll get up and dispose of the condom in a minute, but for now he’d prefer to just lie there limply.

It’s not until he feels Arthur starting to move that he manages to force himself up, disposing of the condom and fetching a cloth to give them both a cursory wipedown. He tosses it into the laundry hamper in the corner and settles on the bed again.

Arthur’s rolled over onto his back and reaches out to lay a proprietary hand over Eames’ lower stomach, his fingers scratching through the light hair there, before smoothing out to lay his palm flat.

Eames moves one of his own hands down to cover Arthur’s, settling their fingers together and rubbing his thumb against the side of Arthur’s. He turns slightly to the side so he has better reach to press a few kisses along Arthur’s shoulder and upper arm. He feels sated and a little sappy.

Arthur looks like he feels the same, watching Eames with a satisfied smile and well-fucked glow.

They lie there in pleasant silence for a while, neither bothering to move, but not quite dozing off. Just content to be together quietly.

After a bit, Arthur shifts a little further onto his side and rubs his fingers over Eames’ stomach, but keeps his hand still enough to not dislodge Eames’ over it. “Do you want to pick a new name?” he asks.

“Why?” Eames frowns slightly, not upset, but also not entirely sure what brought this line of questioning on. Didn’t they already have the talk about Ollie their first morning here? He thought his answers had satisfied Arthur.

“I mean…” Arthur trails off, glances around the room gathering his thoughts. “Well, I thought if maybe your… if how you felt about your identity had changed, maybe you’d want to pick a new name.”

Eames turns his head up to look at the ceiling again as he thinks about that. “I don’t know that things have changed but so much.”

Arthur sits up more, setting his elbow down against the bed to prop himself up, but keeping his other hand where it’s resting under Eames’. “That night at the club you said you weren’t Eames.”

“Hm.” Eames thinks. “Suppose I’m not _exactly_ Eames, but not exactly… not-Eames. I don’t think anything’s changed enough to warrant creating a new identity. I didn’t think you wanted that.”

“I don’t. I didn’t mean creating a new one, I just meant…” Arthur sighs. “I don’t know, I thought maybe like… picking a name for yourself for… for however you feel now. You do feel different, don’t you?”

“I reckon I’ll stick with Eames. That’s what everyone knows me as.”

“Everyone can learn a new name.” Arthur’s being stubborn about this and Eames isn’t exactly sure why. He’d understand if it were about the acting, but this is merely the name.

Eames shrugs again. “It’s what you know me as.”

Arthur frowns. “This is about you, not me. Don’t use it just because you think it’ll be easier for me.”

“Well…” Eames hums. “Mm, Eames is… yours? He’s—I’m… hm.” He’s being woefully inarticulate, but he doesn’t quite know how to verbalize this to Arthur. This sense of belonging, of connection, through Arthur. How much he cherishes it, how scared he is to lose it.

Arthur, who’s still frowning as he listens. “You belong to yourself.”

That isn’t something Eames is going to argue about, he knows they’ll just go round and round. It’s not that he doesn’t know he’s his own person, it’s just that he’s not exactly a person. Whatever he is belongs to him, but who he is is far more malleable and untethered. He likes attaching to Arthur, it’s grounding. It gives a context to himself.

“I like… being with you. Being… attached to you.”

“I’m glad, but you should still be your own first.”

Eames flips Arthur’s hand that still rests under his and winds their fingers together. “I appreciate it, truly, darling. You’re really quite conscientious, did you know that?”

Arthur’s still frowning.

Eames rubs his thumb across the side of Arthur’s gently. “I understand what you’re saying. And why. But I… I need anchor points. I have to find things to attach myself to and build from, I can’t do it in a vacuum or I’m adrift.”

“I don’t want you to lose yourself in me.”

“I know, that’s not what this is about though, really. It’s—”

But Arthur cuts him off before he can delve any further into his explanation, blurting out, “I don’t want to be Mal and Dom.”

Eames holds Arthur’s hand tighter and sits up. “Oh, darling,” he says softly.

“I just—” Arthur glances around the room again. “They were so caught up in each other. So tangled and they… it’s not healthy to be like that. You can be together, you can be a team, but not… not so…”

“Not so inextricable,” Eames supplies.

Arthur nods. “I’m not saying I want distance or that you can’t care about someone deeply or that you need to put up walls or anything, it’s just…”

“You don’t want to go down those dangerous paths they did.”

Arthur nods again.

Eames brings their linked hands up to his mouth and kisses Arthur’s knuckles. “We aren’t them.”

“But your identity thing—”

“I’m working on it. Truly. I hear you and I’m trying. We won’t be them.”

“I’m not trying to push my anxiety on you and force things.”

“I understand why it concerns you. And I appreciate that I’ve… perhaps not had the healthiest approach, generally speaking. But I am trying.”

“I know.”

“Is it enough?”

Arthur looks at Eames sharply. “What do you mean?” There’s an edge to his tone that wasn’t there before, something a little brittle despite its steel.

Eames can see where he’s going with it and tries to head off his concern. “I’m not asking if I’m changing myself enough to satisfy you.”

Arthur nods, but is still watching him warily.

“Remember what I said, back when we decided to try again?”

Arthur nods again, a little slowly. Eames can see in his eyes that he’s turning that conversation over, trying to find what specifically Eames is referencing.

“I told you you can’t fix me.”

“I know, I’m not trying to—”

“Shh, I know. And I understand your worries, I understand why you second guess me. None of it is… unreasonable. But I also need you to know, and not in a defeatist way, that this… is my best. I’m trying.”

“Eames—”

“I told you, if you can’t handle it I won’t handle you not handling it. You need to decide if it’s enough.”

“Is this an ultimatum?”

“No.” Eames sighs and looks down at their still-linked hands. “It’s not.”

“What is it, then?”

“A warning?” Eames tries, a little hesitantly. “A question…”

Arthur sits up more, moving closer into Eames’ space. “What’s the question?”

Eames clenches his jaw and swallows. He’s still staring down at their hands, though he can feel Arthur’s gaze on him. He doesn’t think he can bear to look Arthur in the eye as he talks about this. It isn’t something he verbalizes. Dredging it up feels like pushing on a bruise, tender and aching. Like offering up his belly to Arthur, along with a knife. Like he’s a sacrifice laid at Arthur’s feet, his vulnerability plain and open and waiting for Arthur to use. To strike.

He does his best to gather himself, to will any wobble out of his voice. The best he manages is a rough whisper, but at least his tone is steadier than he feels. “Am I enough?”

“Eames,” Arthur breathes out, sounding stricken. He leans in and pushes his forehead against Eames’, resting there. “You’re more than enough.”

“I’m really—”

“Ollie,” Arthur says, a little sterner this time. He leans back enough to give himself space to bring his free hand up and put it under Eames’ chin, tilting his head until they’re face to face. He waits until Eames meets his eyes and then says, with steel conviction, “You’re enough.”

Eames internally shudders with the intensity of it. He wants to look away, but he’s pinned beneath Arthur’s eyes. Like a butterfly under glass. Captured and held still. It hurts, it’s overwhelming, but in a strange way it’s also warm.

Arthur seems to be waiting for something, so Eames gathers himself enough to offer a little nod. He hopes it’s enough, he isn’t sure what more he can offer at the moment. But luckily that seems to satisfy Arthur, who leans back and loses some of his edge.

After a moment, Eames says, “What I was saying before, it’s not about building myself in your image. It’s just… using you to ground myself. I need external things to do that. And I…” He falters ever so slightly, but recovers quickly to finish with, “Like you.” He hopes Arthur didn’t notice the stumble.

Arthur’s got a shy little smile on his face that’s almost smug. A strange combination, but Eames can see both emotions mixing on his face. “You like me?”

“Very much. And I like… I like who I am with you as a point of context to me.”

“I like you too. I like who I am with you.”

Eames frowns slightly.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting—I mean, you don’t really… _change_.”

“I do,” Arthur says, “Not as much as you, and it’s not the same, but… you change me too. And I like it.”

Eames watches him.

“I like it a lot,” Arthur says, leaning in and kissing him.

It tastes sweet, offered up gently. A caress, careful, but not calculated. Tender, but solid. Not overtly demanding, but with a strength undeniable. He feels Arthur bring his free hand around to cradle the back of his head, his fingers combing through his hair. Their linked hands remain together between them. He can feel Arthur’s breath, the push and pull of his lips, the slight glances of his tongue.

It feels, he thinks, like a promise. Like an understanding.


End file.
